Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Paul Finch 2016

Cover photographs © Arcangel Images / GalleryStock / Stephen Mulcahey

Cover design © Henry Steadman 2016

Paul Finch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007551316

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007551323

Version: 2019-06-20

PRAISE FOR PAUL FINCH

‘Wonderfully dark and peppered with grim humour. Finch is a born storyteller and writes with the authentic voice of the ex-copper he is.’

PETER JAMES

‘Edge-of-the-seat reading … formidable – a British Alex Cross.’

THE SUN

‘An ingenious and original plot. Compulsive reading.’

RACHEL ABBOTT

‘A deliciously twisted and fiendish set of murders and a great pairing of detectives.’

STAV SHEREZ

‘Avon’s big star … part edge-of-the-seat, part hide-behind-the-sofa!’

THE BOOKSELLER

‘An explosive thriller that will leave you completely hooked.’

WE LOVE THIS BOOK

Dedication

For my Dad, Brian, who never lived to see any of my published novels, but who if he had would have been 80 this year. You were always the spark, Dad. You lit the flame that burns in these books.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Paul Finch

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Epilogue

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

Four years ago …

Michael Haygarth didn’t look much like a man who’d raped and murdered two women, but then Lucy had already learned that there was no set physiology for the deranged. He sat on the bench opposite her in the rear of the unmarked police van. Throughout the journey here he’d remained perfectly still, his head hanging low as though the muscles in his neck and shoulders couldn’t support it.

It was an awkward posture. Haygarth was tall, about six-four, but lanky too, and, folded into this confined space, his sharp-tipped knees came almost to his chest. He was somewhere in his forties, she surmised, though she couldn’t be sure exactly, and balding, what little hair he had left around the back and sides shaved to grey bristles. His skin was brownish, tanned – as if he’d spent time abroad or maybe was of mixed-race, though apparently neither of those applied. With his weak chin, snub nose and buck teeth, he had a rodent-like aspect, and yet there was something oddly innocent about him. From his glazed eyes and vacant expression you’d have wondered if he wasn’t all there. There was certainly no hint of violence in his demeanour. Rather than a murder suspect, he looked the sort of hopeless, unemployed oddball who’d sit on park benches all day.

And yet he’d confessed. Under no duress whatsoever.

With a crunch of brakes, the van ground to a halt, presumably on the unmade track leading into Borsdane Wood, though it was impossible to be sure because the only windows in the rear of the van were small, mesh-filled panels set in its back doors, and only gloom penetrated past these, unaided by their dim, smeary glass. There was muffled movement as the other detectives crammed into the back of the vehicle stirred. Metal bumped and clanked as they sorted through the pile of spades and picks lying along the riveted steel floor.

The van’s back doors were yanked open from the outside. Frigid air flowed in, smoky breath weaving around the tall, lean form of DI Doyle and the shorter, stumpier figure of DS Crellin. They’d already donned their white Tyvek coveralls and disposable gloves, and now stood with torches in hand.

‘Michael, it’s your time,’ Doyle said, flipping open her pocketbook. ‘I’ve got all your instructions written down. But I want to confirm them with you. We’re at the end of this track now, where the bollards are … so we go on foot from here, approximately forty paces north, yes?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Haygarth replied in his wavering, flutelike voice, still not looking up.

‘We go that way until we come to an old rotted log lying crosswise on our path, correct?’

‘That’s right, ma’am.’

‘From there, we walk thirty paces west … until the ground slopes upward?’

‘Yes.’

‘We don’t ascend the slope, but navigate along the base of it for another fifty paces … until we come to a clump of silver birch.’

‘They’re not all silver birch, ma’am.’ He still didn’t look up, but his words were slow, thoughtful. ‘But there’s a few silver birch in there. You won’t be able to miss it.’

‘Let’s hope not, Michael … for all our sakes. There’s a clearing in the middle of this clump, somewhat unnatural because you cleared it out yourself some time ago. And that’s where the two graves are?’

‘Correct, ma’am.’

‘How deep did you say you buried them again?’

‘A foot or so. You’ll find both bodies in a few minutes.’

The officers pondered this in silence. Haygarth was in custody for the rape and attempted murder of the seventy-five year old woman who lived next door to him. The admission that he’d raped and strangled two prostitutes three years earlier and had buried their bodies out in Borsdane Wood was unlooked for and had come completely out of the blue during the course of his very first interview. At the time, no one had known what to make of it, but a rapid-fire check on the system had revealed that in roughly the same time-zone two Crowley-based sex workers, a Gillian Allen and Donna King, had been listed as missing persons. No trace of them had been found since.

‘One final thought on this, Michael,’ Doyle said, voice clipped and stern. ‘If we get lost, we’ll come back for you so you can show us the location in person. But I warn you now … I won’t be impressed if that’s the case. These directions had better be good.’

‘They’re right, ma’am. You’ll find it.’

Doyle backed away, Crellin alongside her as the rest of the team lumbered to the doors. Lucy, who was handcuffed to the prisoner, had to change position first, switching across the interior to sit next to him. One by one, the rest of the team, now armed with shovels and spades, jumped down outside, where Crellin handed them each a set of overalls.

‘No shoe covers till we get to the actual scene,’ Doyle said. ‘We’ll be tramping through God knows what kind of crap before we reach it.’

In the milky twilight of this dull February evening, the wood was a leafless tangle, the unmade road snaking back away from them beneath a roof of wet, black branches. Lucy glanced at her watch. Just before five. Another forty minutes and it would be pitch-dark. Unless they’d already uncovered physical evidence by then – in which case the entire arc-lit circus would be summoned – there’d be nothing else they could do until morning, which perhaps explained why everyone was in a hurry, Crellin’s voice issuing gruff instructions as the sound of their boot-falls receded.

Only Lucy and DI Mandy Doyle now remained.

She was an odd-looking woman, Doyle: tall, lean of build, pinched of face and often dressed messily in skirts, blouses and jackets that never seemed to match. She walked with a slight stoop and had longish, straggly brown hair streaked with grey, all of which combined to make her look older than she probably was, which couldn’t have been much more than thirty-five. In particular, Lucy found her attitude puzzling. A woman who’d fought her way up through the ranks, one might have thought she’d welcome the arrival of a young female officer on her first CID attachment, but from the outset Doyle had seemed to find Lucy’s presence frustrating.

‘She just wants to get ahead,’ Crellin had confided in Lucy earlier that week. ‘She doesn’t feel she’s got the time to break in trainees.’

‘I’m not exactly a trainee, sarge,’ Lucy had protested. ‘I’ve been six years in uniform.’

‘Sure, sure … you don’t have to convince me. But Mandy’s a bit funny like that. She’s got this idea that the team’s only as strong as its weakest link. If you’re going to work with us, she’ll expect you to pull your weight.’

‘I’ll pull my weight, don’t worry.’

‘I know that, I’ve seen your record.’ He’d winked. ‘And I’m sure Mandy knows it too.’

Lucy was less sure about that. Especially at present.

‘Hang onto this fella like your life depends on it, Detective Constable Clayburn,’ Doyle said, her limpid gaze flicking from Lucy to the prisoner and back again. There was rarely a hint of friendship in her voice, but on this occasion her tone was especially ominous. ‘Though I suppose we mustn’t exaggerate … it isn’t your life as much as your job. Because for the next hour at least this suspect is your responsibility. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Perfectly, ma’am,’ Lucy replied, straightening up dutifully, but irritated to be addressed this way in front of Haygarth, who gave no indication that he was listening but could hardly have failed to overhear.

Doyle droned on in the same menacing monotone, as if she hadn’t received any such reassurance. ‘Be warned … if anything happens while we’re over there digging, anything at all – your fault, his fault, the fault of some squirrel because he distracted you by shitting on the roof – it doesn’t matter. Anything happens while we’re away that is prejudicial to this enquiry, you will carry the can. And if, by any very unfortunate circumstance, you manage to lose him, well –’ Doyle cracked a half-smile, though typically it was devoid of humour ‘– in that case, the best thing you can do is sneak off home and send us your resignation by snail-mail.’

‘I understand, ma’am,’ Lucy said.

‘Don’t engage him in conversation. If he tries to talk to you, just tell him to shut up. If he tries anything fancy, and he gets out of hand … remember, you’ve got your radio and we’re only a hundred yards away. You’ve also got Alan in the driving cab … you only need to shout and he’ll come running.’

Alan Denning was one of the bigger, beefier detectives in Crowley CID. He was thinning on top, but had a thick red moustache and beard, and the meanest eyes Lucy had ever seen. If it kicked off, he looked as if he’d be more than useful. But in truth the last thing they needed was for something bad to happen. Haygarth hadn’t been charged with anything yet, but assuming it all went as planned, he’d be facing lots and lots of prison time, and though he might be acquiescent now – perhaps struggling to come to terms with what he’d done to the harmless OAP next door – in due course he’d realise the big trouble he was in. So at all costs they needed to avoid handing him something his legal reps could use as leverage, such as an injury. It didn’t matter whether it was inflicted on him in self-defence or in an effort to prevent him escaping, any time police officers assaulted suspects these days it exponentially increased said suspect’s chance of walking free.

‘But I don’t think you’re going to try anything silly, are you, Michael?’ Doyle said.

Haygarth didn’t reply. His head still hung; his posture was so still it was almost creepy.

Lucy, on the other hand, was churning inside. It wasn’t just the embarrassing warning she’d been issued. Even without that, it had now dawned on her how serious this shift was turning out to be. The strange, distant man linked to her right wrist might actually be a multiple killer. It was unnerving, but it was exciting too. After several years in uniform spent ticketing cars, chasing problem teenagers and nicking shoplifters, this was what she’d really joined for, this was why she’d applied again and again for a CID post.

‘Michael, can you hear me?’ Doyle persisted.

‘Uh?’ Haygarth glanced up. As before, he only seemed half aware what was going on. ‘Erm … yes, ma’am.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes, I’ll be good.’

In actual fact, Lucy didn’t think the guy would pose much of a threat even if he wasn’t. He was tall, but rail-thin, whereas she, who was about twenty years younger, was in the best shape of her life. Okay, she didn’t represent the Greater Manchester Police women’s hockey and squash teams any more, but she regularly ran, swam and visited the gym.

‘Excellent,’ Doyle said. ‘That’s all I needed to know, Michael. You play fair with us, and we’ll play fair with you.’ She turned back to Lucy. ‘Remember what I said, DC Clayburn.’

‘Certainly will, ma’am,’ Lucy replied.

The DI made no further comment, just slowly and purposefully closed the doors to the van. For what seemed like a minute, her trudging footfalls diminished into the woods. After that, there was only stillness, though other sounds gradually became audible: a faint metallic clicking as the engine cooled; the hiss of dead air on the police radio; the dull but distinctive murmur of music and voices from the cab at the front, most likely Radio One. Beyond all that, the silence in the encircling trees was oppressive. Borsdane Wood wasn’t as idyllic as it might sound, covering several hundred acres of abandoned industrial land on the town’s northern outskirts, not far from the old power station and sewage plant, and ultimately terminating at the M61 motorway. In summer it was trackless and overgrown, and in winter bleak and isolated. Bottles, beer cans and other rubbish routinely strewed its clearings; more than once, drugs paraphernalia had been found. No one ever came here for picnics.

Lucy rubbed her gloved hands together. The temperature inside the van was noticeably dwindling, mainly because the engine had been switched off so the heating had deactivated. She glanced sidelong at Haygarth. Someone had given him a coat to wear over the white custody tracksuit, but if he was feeling any chill, he wasn’t showing it. His head still hung, while his hands, which looked overlarge and knobbly at the ends of his long, thin wrists, were clasped together as though in penitential prayer.

This had certainly been his attitude since DI Doyle had arrested him earlier that day. It wasn’t unknown for violent criminals to occasionally feel guilty, or even to turn themselves in through remorse. Others coughed because their life outside prison had become unendurable, because they needed a more stable and disciplined regime. But neither of those possibilities struck Lucy as a given where Michael Haygarth was concerned. Perhaps they might if his only offence had been to attack the lady next door, but the conscience thing didn’t seem quite so likely when you considered that up until now he’d been happily sitting on the deaths of two other women.

Unexpectedly, he looked up and around. ‘Ma’am … I, erm …’ His eyes widened, in fact bugged, while his wet mouth had screwed itself out of shape as if he suddenly felt distressed about something.

‘Best not to talk, Michael.’ Lucy refused to make eye contact with him. ‘It’s for your own good.’

‘But … I need to relieve myself.’

‘You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid.’

‘Seriously … don’t think I can. Didn’t Miss Doyle say they might be an hour or more?’

‘It’s honestly best if we don’t talk.’

‘But this is ridiculous.’ His voice thickened with feeling as he stared down at the floor again. It was his first show of emotion in several hours, since he’d been arrested in fact, and yet still there was that air of the pathetic about him, of the beaten.

‘Michael … it’s just not possible at the moment,’ Lucy said, angry with herself for having started conversing with him.

‘All I want is a toilet break, and … now you’re not letting me have one.’

‘You never mentioned you needed a break back at the nick.’

‘I didn’t need one then.’

‘We’ve only been out here ten bloody minutes.’

‘Sorry, but I can’t help it. It’s all that tea you kept pouring down my throat in the interview room.’

‘Just try and wait, Michael … you’re not a kid.’

But he now sat stiffly upright, his face etched with discomfort. ‘What if I released it down my leg and messed your van up, eh? All because I couldn’t hold it? I bet you’d have a right go at me, wouldn’t you?’

Lucy thought long and hard.

It wouldn’t be the first time a prisoner had urinated on her, and quite often that had happened inside the back of a police vehicle. It wasn’t always their fault; some of them were losers in so many aspects of life. And it wasn’t as if clothing couldn’t go in the wash or that she herself couldn’t just step under a warm shower. But it always took so long to get the smell out of the car or van. This was a pool vehicle, of course, and different officers would drive it every day, so it wouldn’t solely be her problem … except that she was the one who’d get blamed for it, and on top of that, she’d be stuck in here tonight with the stink for God knew how long.

‘They probably won’t be more than an hour,’ she said, though it was as much an attempt to convince herself as Haygarth, and in that regard it didn’t work.

Most likely they’d be much more than an hour. They might even be several hours.

He muttered something else, his voice turning hoarse. She noticed that his bony knees, formerly wide apart, were squeezed together. He’d begun twitching, fidgeting.

Could it really do any harm?

‘Alright,’ she said reluctantly. ‘We go outside and you pee against the nearest tree, but you’ll have to do it one-handed because you’re staying cuffed.’

‘That’s fine.’ He sounded relieved and waited patiently while Lucy reached down, found the release lever on the door and flipped it upright.

If Alan Denning in the cab heard the clunk of the rear locks disengaging, he didn’t respond. Most likely, he couldn’t hear it with what sounded like Rhianna blaring away. Lucy thought to call him anyway, for the purpose of extra security, but decided that Denning, being the epitome of the big, unfeeling, hairy-arsed male copper, would most likely respond with: ‘Don’t be so soft, Clayburn! Make him fucking wait! He can tie a fucking knot in it!’ Or something similarly enlightened.

She kept her mouth shut as she climbed out onto the road, Haygarth following, grit and twigs crunching under their feet. Proper darkness now enveloped the woods, the source of the constant dripping and pattering completely invisible. Lucy’s torch had been purloined by one of the others, but there was sufficient light spilling from the back of the van to show the nearest tree-trunk, a glinting black/green pillar standing on the verge about five yards away, with a huge hollow some eight feet up it, where a knot had fallen out. Haygarth made a beeline towards it, but Lucy stopped him, first peering down the length of the van to see if anyone else on the team was hanging around at the front, maybe having a smoke. From what she could see, there was no one. The glow of the headlights speared forward, delineating the concrete bollards that signified the end of the track. Those too sparkled with moisture. Beyond them lay a dense mesh of sepia-brown undergrowth. Nothing moved.

‘Okay,’ she said, proceeding to the tree. ‘This’ll do. Make it quick.’

Haygarth grunted with gratitude as he assumed the position. Lucy stood alongside him, but turned her shoulder so that, even by accident, she couldn’t glance down and catch sight of anything. It fleetingly occurred to her that, given, Haygarth’s alleged form, this voluntary blindsiding of herself might not be the wisest policy, but it was done now, and he had the air of a broken man in any case – plus Alan Denning was only a shout away.

She heard Haygarth sigh as liquid splashed gently down the bole of the tree.

‘That’s much better,’ he mumbled. ‘God, I’ve been waiting for this.’

‘DC Clayburn, what the hell’s going on?’

Lucy turned, surprised. Behind the blob of torchlight approaching from beyond the bollards there was an indistinct figure, but she knew who it was. The clumsy, slightly stooped gait was the main giveaway, but the harsh, humourless voice was added proof.

‘Ma’am, the prisoner …’ Lucy’s words tailed off as everything suddenly seemed to go wrong at once.

First, she sensed movement alongside her. When she glanced around, Haygarth, who was six foot four – and with one arm extended upward could reach to nearly nine feet – was rooting inside the tree-trunk cavity.

‘What’re you …?’ she said, fleetingly baffled.

Next, DI Doyle ran forward. At the same time, with a metallic thud, a driving-cab door swung open in response. Then there was a plasticky crackle, and Haygarth laughed, or rather giggled – it was a hyena-like sound rather than human.

Lucy tried to grab his arm, but he barged into her with his left shoulder, knocking her off balance. And now the object he’d been groping for inside the tree came into view. It was only small, but it had been swathed in a supermarket wrapper to protect it, so its make and model were concealed. And it was anyone’s guess what calibre it was.

As Lucy fell to the ground, he swung the object around. Its first booming report took out Doyle’s torch. She was only about ten yards away, but her light vanished with a PLOK. By the way she grunted and gasped and doubled over, the bullet had punched clean through it, tearing into her midriff.

Lucy, prone on her back, was too numb to react. Hideous, unimaginable seconds seemed to pass before her training kicked in and she tried to roll away – only for her right arm to pull taut where it was handcuffed to Haygarth’s left. As she struggled to escape, he turned a slow circle, still laughing, a black skeletal figure in the reduced light, a man of sticks, a living scarecrow. And yet so much stronger than he looked. With embarrassing ease, he yanked her backwards, throwing her hard onto her spine, and pointed his bag down at her, smoke still venting from the hole blown at the end.

She kicked out, slamming the flat of her foot against his right knee. There was a crack of sinew, and Haygarth’s leg buckled. He gave a piercing squeal as he collapsed on top of her, at the same time trying to hit her with his weapon. She blocked the blow with her left arm, and fleetingly their faces were an inch apart, his no longer the melancholic image she’d seen earlier, but a portrait of dementia, foam surging through his clenched buck-teeth, cheeks bunched, brow furrowed.

He headbutted her. Right on the bridge of her nose.

The pain that smashed through the middle of Lucy’s head was so intense that she almost blacked out, and as such didn’t see the weapon as he swept it down at her again, twice in fact, both times catching her clean on the left temple. A double explosion roared in her skull. As awareness faded and hot, sticky fluid pooled over her left eye, she saw him kneel upright, sweating, drool stringing from his mouth as he bit at the plastic wrapping, exposing the gleaming steel pistol underneath, and then pointed it down at her face – only to go rigid as a massive blow clattered the back of his own head.

Consciousness ebbing away, the last thing Lucy saw was Haygarth’s thin, limp form as it was hauled roughly off her by the brute force that was Alan Denning.

Chapter 1

Now …

He said that his name was Ronnie Ford and that he was from Warrington. By the looks of his heavy build, weathered face and chalk-grey hair, he was somewhere in his late forties. Apparently, he ran his own business – an auto-repair shop, which explained his ragged sweater and oil-stained canvas trousers – but he added that he was now on his way home for tea. Weirdly, the longer the woman rode alongside him, the more she came to suspect that he’d picked her up for honest, even gentlemanly reasons.

For the first fifteen minutes of their shared journey, he’d kept his eyes firmly on the road, chatting amiably, covering every subject under the sun, from the unseasonably mild autumn weather, to the poor state of the Malaga hotel where he and his wife had spent two weeks last August, to the latest and, in his opinion, even-more-hopeless-than-usual contestants on the new series of X Factor. It was all very affable and light-hearted.

So … a bit of a father figure, Ronnie Ford.

Or at least, an avuncular uncle type.

But ultimately he was a man too. And seemingly as red-blooded as so many others.

When he parked the car in the quiet lay-by and she climbed out, he climbed out as well. When she ran giggling to the stile, he followed her, expressing open if feigned admiration as she climbed it with lithe efficiency, despite her tight, knee-length skirt and four-inch heels. It helped, of course, that she did it sexily, wiggling up the rickety ladder and stepping prettily over its topmost rung before descending into the field on the other side.

At this point, he shouted. ‘Hold up, love! Whoa … wait a minute!’

He’d lost sight of her, thanks mainly to the autumn twilight. It was early October and not yet seven in the evening, so it wasn’t what you’d actually call dusk. It wasn’t even what you’d call cold. They’d had an Indian summer, which even now was only dissipating slowly, but light was leaching from the cloudy sky and dim traces of mist rising in the undergrowth.

In the field, hacked stubble was all that remained of a recently harvested crop. It was roughly the size of a football pitch, but as the woman already knew, there was a clear pathway running straight as a ribbon to a belt of reddish-leafed trees on its far side. She hared off along this, still giggling. She had no idea why men found that ‘cheeky giggle’ thing fetching; she supposed it harked back to those daft naughty schoolgirl fantasies that generation after generation of saucy movies and top-shelf lads’ mags had impressed on British male society.

From behind, she heard the clump of Ronnie Ford’s feet on the wooden rungs, and his loud grunts for breath. A non-too-fit avuncular uncle then, but evidently a man who now felt he was on a mission.

They usually were in the end. It was always so pathetically easy.

She’d only needed to remove her black knitted beret and shake out her blonde locks, ease down the zip on her anorak just sufficiently to reveal the skimpy blouse underneath, and then cross and uncross her legs a few times while he’d attempted to drive.

The surreptitious sidelong glances had started soon after. And then, about quarter of an hour into the journey, when the suggestive conversation had commenced, she’d known he was hers.

‘It’s okay to check me out,’ she said in what was almost an apologetic tone. ‘I know I’m a bit of alright. Men are always saying crude stuff like that to me. I’ve got used to it now. So if it makes it easier for you, I don’t mind you looking.’

‘The problem is,’ he replied, heat visibly flaming the back of his neck, ‘I’ve got to concentrate on the road. Where did you say you were heading for again?’

‘Liverpool.’

‘I can drop you off at Warrington bus station. You’ll have no problem getting a connection to Liverpool from there. It’s not too far.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘Not at all.’

Despite having permission, Ronnie still only glanced furtively at her. Possibly he was even more of a gentleman than she’d first thought. Or maybe it was just his age and upbringing. She’d all but invited him to ogle her, but his initial reaction seemed to be to try and resist, to try to avoid getting drawn into those huge doe-eyes, which had gazed on him so beseechingly when he’d first pulled up alongside her, as if to say: ‘Are you here to help? Is it possible you are genuinely here to help? Or are you only after one thing too?’

That always added to the allure, the ‘little girl lost’ approach.

She resumed that teasing conversation, again crossing and uncrossing her legs so that the hem of her skirt started to rise.

‘Warrington’s still quite a ride from here,’ she said. ‘And I’ve nothing to pay you with.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘I’m going that direction anyway.’

‘Yes, but you should get something for your trouble. I’m Loretta, by the way.’

‘Erm … nice to meet you, Loretta.’

Somewhat belatedly, he fiddled with the radio, trying to find a different station, something smoother than the hard-edged rock jarring out at them. After twenty seconds jamming and prodding, he located a slow, bluesy saxophone and turned it down a notch so that it could clearly be heard but at the same time they could talk.

‘What about it?’ she asked again, watching him. ‘How do I make it worth your while?’

‘Don’t be daft, Loretta …’

But she wasn’t being daft. And he knew it.

The revealing attire, the improper pose, the Marilyn Monroe combo of sweet, innocent kid and pulse-pounding vamp.

‘Look … I don’t mean to imply anything, but …’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘I don’t have much cash on me.’

‘You’re paying your way by giving me a ride,’ she tittered. ‘I’m just wondering if I can return the favour.’

‘Don’t taunt me like that, love,’ he said, driving less than steadily. ‘You’ll make a sad old man even sadder.’

‘No, I’m serious,’ she responded. ‘I want to make it up to you any way I can. You’ll find I’m very broadminded.’

‘Yeah?’ Though it wasn’t really a question.

‘Look … just ahead there’s a turn,’ she said. ‘That’s a backroad. It leads to Abram eventually, but about half a mile along it there’s a lay-by for lorries and such. There’s a chippie van there during the day, but it’ll be closed at this hour. We could park up.’

He glanced at her wonderingly. Whatever he’d been about to say died on his tongue, his eyes diverting down to where the zip on her silver anorak had completely descended, exposing a deep, creamy cleavage, and then even further down, to where a pair of black stocking-tops were revealed, along with shiny clips and taut, white straps.

He looked again at her beautiful face, this time askance. And then he grinned. Broadly if somewhat disbelievingly. ‘Is this for real?’

‘Maybe. You’ll have to find out.’

And if nothing else, he was keen to do that. Which was why she was now three quarters of the way across an empty field, with the darkling trees in front and Ronnie Ford about fifty yards behind.

‘Loretta?’ he called, huffing and puffing as he attempted to follow. ‘Come on, eh?’

He wasn’t just unfit, he was clearly unhealthy. Just climbing over the stile appeared to have sapped him of energy. Perhaps it would be necessary to give him further encouragement. The wood stood in front of her, the path leading into it through a natural archway amid the nearest trees. As soon as she entered, and was fleetingly out of view, the woman hiked her skirt up and slipped her lacy white knickers down, stepping nimbly out of them and hanging the garment on a nearby twig.

Giggling again, she hurried on into the darkness. Any reservations he might still have harboured ought to evaporate completely now.

‘Loretta?’ He tried to make a joke of it as he breathlessly entered the wood. ‘As you’ve seen, I’m approaching the autumn of my years. I might be like a fine vintage wine, but I can’t chase around the countryside anymore.’

She watched him from about forty yards in front, from behind the clump of rhododendrons she’d been looking for on the left side of the path.

Approximately five yards into the trees, he stopped and pivoted round. Suddenly wary.

She wondered what he was thinking.

A blue murk was spreading amid the gnarled stanchions of the trunks. Here and there, ground-level bushes hung heavy with dew. There was a reek of woodland decay, of fungus and leaf-mulch. All was deathly still.

It looked as if he was about to start retreating. But then he stopped short.

Ten yards to his right, he’d spotted the pair of knickers suspended from their twig.

Hurriedly, he lumbered over there, fingers twitching, apparently eager to fondle that soft, pliable material.

Yeah … so much for the avuncular uncle.

He yanked the garment down and spread it out in two hands, to check its authenticity no doubt. Then he folded it into a small, neat square and inserted it into his left hip pocket, before ambling back to the path and proceeding along it towards her, penetrating deeper into the ever-gloomier trees but now with a big lewd grin on his mug.

She’d have laughed aloud if it wouldn’t have given her away.

The poor stupid sod really thought he was going to get some.

Chapter 2

The Hatchwood Green estate was a sinkhole even by the standards of Crowley, which was one of Greater Manchester’s most deprived boroughs. It had been constructed in the 1950s, along with the rest of the district’s many council estates, though this was one of the largest, having been built on extensive brownfield land – a site formerly occupied by the long defunct Manchester Railway Company – and in so many ways it embodied the decline of the council housing dream in post-war Britain.

Brand-new, spacious living accommodation for Crowley’s working class had soon turned sour for its residents as they’d found themselves isolated from the town centre and other amenities, and often from jobs. More to the point, this new community was broken from the outset, as its members had already sacrificed the old social networks they’d formerly built up in order to move. Follow that with decades of neglect, the gradual deterioration of cheaply built properties due to their having exceeded their expected lifetimes, and the increased and often twin ravages of drugs and crime, and you were left with a truly depressing environment. Years later, even with right-to-buy in force, Hatchwood Green still had the aura of desolation and menace.

To PC Lucy Clayburn’s jaundiced eye – and she couldn’t help but see it this way as a copper – there was something inherently soul-destroying about these immense, sprawling housing estates: all the domiciles built from the same red brick, their doors existing in repeating patterns of pale blue, pale red or pale yellow; the patches of grass between them boasting no other distinguishing features – no trees, no bushes, no flowerbeds – though they occasionally hosted the relics of kiddies’ playgrounds. And of course, when they had dropped into disrepair, as this one had, with dilapidated housing and broken fences, their inhospitable aura reached a new low.

So it was with the usual air of stoic boredom that, one Wednesday night, she and PC Malcolm Peabody, the twenty-year-old probationer she’d been puppy-walking for the past couple of months, drove their liveried BMW saloon onto the Hatchwood, to attend 24 Clapgate Road in response to a reported domestic.

This house was in no better or worse state than those around it: a small front garden, which was mainly a trash heap (though it hadn’t used to be, Lucy recalled), a rotted gate hanging from its hinges and thick tufts of weed growing through the lopsided paving along the front path. They could hear the hubbub inside as soon as they pulled up. When they actually entered – the house’s front door having opened immediately to Lucy’s firm, no-nonsense knock – the interior looked as if a bomb had hit it, though it was difficult to tell whether this was a new mess or just the usual one. Dingy wallpaper and mouldering carpets implied the latter, but it was hard to make out whether the bits of strewn underwear, or the beer tins, dog-ends and other foul bric-a-brac, were recent additions. The atmosphere, of course, was rancid: a mingled fetor of sweat, cigarettes, booze and ketchup – which was sad as well as sickening, Lucy thought, because again, that hadn’t always been the case at this address.

The occupants were Rob and Dora Hallam, he a displaced and unemployed Welshman, she a local lass who’d recently been sacked from her supermarket job for being light-fingered. They were both in their late thirties, though they looked older: ratty-haired, sallow-faced, gap-toothed. Rob Hallam was short, stumpy and overweight, Dora thin to the point of emaciation, her facial features sunken as though the very bone structure was decaying. At present he was wearing Y-fronts, a vest and a pair of dirty socks. She was in flip-flops, pyjama bottoms and a Manchester United shirt.

Both were streaming blood, Rob from a split eyebrow and gouged left cheek, Dora from a burst nose, which as she sniffled into a handkerchief, continued to discharge itself in a constant succession of sticky crimson bubbles.

The main set-to looked to have occurred in the lounge. That was where most of the wrecked furniture and broken glass was congregated. The door connecting the lounge to the kitchen, which now lay wrenched from its hinges against an armchair, was also a giveaway. But whatever violence had erupted before, it was over now, primarily because the combatants were too exhausted to continue. They stood apart, one at either side of the room, panting, glaring. In between them, quite surreally, the television played away to itself, screening the crazy antics of Cow and Chicken.

‘So what am I going to do with the pair of you?’ Lucy asked, having stood in stony silence during the predictable exchange of accusations and counter-accusations, and refusing to give a moment’s thought to Rob Hallam’s meandering explanation that the squabble had started over his wife’s ‘fucking stupid’ assertion that the Red Guy, Cow and Chicken’s nemesis, was supposed to be imaginary and not the real-life Devil.

‘You’ve got to arrest him,’ Dora whimpered, seemingly surprised that this hadn’t happened already.

‘Arrest him?’ Lucy said. ‘Dora … every time we try to arrest him, you either go ballistic as soon as we lay hands on him, or come rushing down to the station and insist he hasn’t done anything wrong.’

‘You can see that this time he has.’ Dora yanked her hair with bloodstained fingers. ‘Look at the state of me.’

‘And look at the state of Rob.’

‘But I had to defend myself …’

‘What did you use?’ Lucy asked. ‘A meat-grinder?’

Dora’s mouth dropped open, guppy-like with incomprehension.

‘The point I’m making, Dora,’ Lucy said, ‘is that you’re both as bad as each other. Every time you have a drink, you have a fight, usually over nothing … and you wake the whole neighbourhood up. And it’s not just every Friday and Saturday. Now it seems it’s weekdays too.’ She glanced at Rob. ‘And what’ve you got to say for yourself? And don’t give me some bollocks excuse about kids’ cartoons!’

Rob regarded her hollow-eyed. ‘She’s right. I need locking up. Even if she withdraws her complaint, you can do that, can’t you? You said that last time.’

‘That’s right, Rob … but this isn’t a straightforward assault, is it? You’re going to need at least as many stitches as she is. Your brief’ll have a field day. Unless I lock you both up, of course.’ Lucy knuckled her chin. ‘I could charge you both with wounding, breach of the peace, causing damage to council property … that might get a result.’

‘Both of us?’ Rob looked startled.

‘Both of us?’ Dora echoed, as if this had never been part of the plan.

‘It’s the age of equal opportunities, love,’ Lucy replied. ‘Spousal abuse works both ways these days.’

Dora’s mouth slackened into another bewildered gape.

‘Course,’ Lucy added, ‘ultimately, it’d be a waste of all our time, wouldn’t it? Not to mention expensive … when what you really need is to go and get some counselling.’ She stepped across the wreckage-strewn room, and took a framed photo from the cluttered mantelpiece. It depicted a little blond boy, smiling happily despite his missing front teeth. ‘When Bobbie died, it changed everything for you two, didn’t it?’

Rob slumped onto the couch. He shook a can, sipped out a last dreg and discarded it onto the floor. ‘I can’t remember a time before that,’ he said.

‘You need to try,’ Lucy replied.

In response, he reached into a carrier bag next to the couch, took out a fresh can and ripped it open.

‘What do you mean counselling?’ Dora asked.

‘Grief counselling,’ Lucy said. ‘Look, I know Bobbie’s death changed your lives, Dora, because I never had to come here in the middle of the night before then. But it’s five years ago, love. And it’s still tearing you apart. So you need some professional help. There’s something else. You need to stop hitting the pop.’ She snatched the can from Rob’s grasp and placed it on the mantel. ‘You can get some help for that too … but you’ve got to want it first.’

Rob gazed blearily up at her. ‘So … I’m not getting locked up?’

He seemed puzzled rather than relieved, though perhaps now that he’d calmed down a little, it was dawning on him that the advantages of being allowed to sleep in his own bed outweighed the disadvantages of being cooped up in a vomit-stained police cell.

‘That depends.’ Lucy indicated the broken door. ‘What about this?’

‘Suppose I can fix it.’

‘Definitely?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When?’

‘Soon as I get round to it.’

‘Not good enough, Rob. I’m back on duty tomorrow afternoon. I’ll make this my first port of call. Will it be fixed by then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Sure? Stare me in the eye and say it.’

‘Yeah,’ he said again, though he looked too haggard to be totally convincing.

‘Okay …’ Lucy pondered. ‘Before I leave here, I want a solemn promise from you two jokers that, for the rest of tonight … no, let’s not cheapen it … for the rest of this year, I won’t get a call-back to this address.’

‘Promise,’ Dora said quietly.

Rob nodded again.

‘You have to get some help, you understand?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

Lucy knew they wouldn’t. It might be all quiet now, but in a few days’ time tempers would flare again over something completely ridiculous. The Hallams were too stuck in this rut, too damaged by events, too drunk on misery and hopelessness to effect any kind of change in their own fortunes. For anyone to keep proceeding down a dark, dank tunnel there had to be at least a flicker of light at the end. But in truth, Lucy didn’t really care a great deal. She couldn’t afford to. At times she was so tired out by these mini disasters in the lives of others that all she wanted to do was shut them down any way she could, even if it was only temporarily.

‘Alright …’ She put her radio to her lips. ‘1485 to Three, receiving?’

‘Go ahead, Lucy,’ Comms crackled back.

‘Yeah, I’m finished at Clapgate Lane. No offences revealed. All parties advised, over.’

‘Roger, thanks for that.’

‘That was so cool,’ Peabody said, as they climbed back into the panda.

‘Cool?’

‘The way you defused that situation.’

‘It defused itself.’ She put the car in gear. ‘They were too knackered to keep fighting.’

‘Yeah, but we could’ve locked them both up. Plenty of reason. Instead, you calmed it down, had a few words, put them right, spared them a difficult time …’

‘And saved us a raft of paperwork.’ Lucy drove them away from the kerb. ‘That was my main motivation.’

Peabody chuckled. ‘Can’t fool me. You just didn’t want to bring any more crap down on them … you’re getting soft-hearted in your old age.’

He was a rangy, raw-boned lad, red-haired and freckled, and to an outsider his tone might have seemed a tad impertinent given that Lucy was a ten-year veteran of the job and he’d only been in it a few months, but a few months on the beat in a town like Crowley counted for a lot. Even a few days spent side-by-side on the frontline could bond coppers together like no other job outside the military.

‘Well …’ Lucy swung them towards the south end of the estate. ‘It’s not like they haven’t had a lot to deal with.’

‘What happened to the kiddie, anyway?’

‘Run over.’

‘Christ!’

‘On the way home from school. Horseplay with his mates … ends up stepping off the pavement in front of a bus.’

‘Sounds messy …’

‘It was.’

‘You were there?’

‘First responder. But there was nothing anyone could do. After that, I had to deliver the death message.’ She sighed. ‘Not among my favourite memories.’

Before Peabody could say more, the air was shattered by a burst of static from the radio.

‘November Three to all units, urgent message … female reported under attack in the telephone kiosk at the top end of Darthill Road. Anyone to attend, over!’

‘1485 and 9993 en route from Hatchwood Green!’ Peabody shouted as Lucy spun the car in a U-turn and blazed back across the housing estate, activating the blues and twos as she did.

They were three miles from Darthill Road, which ran from top to bottom of a steep hill; on its south side it was lined by houses but on its north it gave way to arid spoil-land. As such, there was only one real approach to it, but other patrols had been closer and by the time Lucy and Peabody arrived at the phone-box, Sergeant Robertson in the Area Car had got there ahead of them. A Traffic unit was also in attendance, alongside an ambulance, which rather fortuitously, had already been in the area. From the radio messages bouncing back and forth, it sounded as if the assailant had fled on foot.

Lucy and Peabody jumped out and dashed forward.

The girl, who was clearly young but too bloodied around the face to be recognisable, sat crying on the kerb, two female paramedics kneeling as they tended her cuts and bruises. Robertson was on his phone to CID, but a quick conflab with the Traffic guys, who were already deploying incident tape, revealed that the attacker had dragged his would-be victim a few yards onto the rough ground, before she’d fought him to a standstill. He’d then had to punch her repeatedly to subdue her, after which, thinking he’d knocked her out, he’d started going through her handbag – only for her to suddenly jump up again and leg it. Having already lost her mobile to the bastard, she’d scrambled into the phone-box and called 999. The assailant was kicking the hell out of its door when she managed to get through. That was when he finally did a runner.

Lucy raced back to the car and leapt in, Peabody hurriedly following.

‘Get onto Comms,’ she told him, flinging the vehicle around in a rapid three-point turn. ‘Tell them we need India 99.’ That call sign wasn’t officially used any more in GMP, but some police terminology never changed. ‘We want the eye in the sky.’

‘So where are we going?’ Peabody asked.

‘The other side of the Aggies.’

‘You think he’ll have got over there already?’

‘He’ll have heard our sirens, Malcolm … if that doesn’t put wings on his heels, nothing will.’

‘This time of night he’ll break his bloody neck.’

‘Most of these scrotes grew up round here. They’ll have played there as kids. Don’t underestimate their local knowledge. Now get me that bloody chopper!’

The Aggies was one of numerous spoil-heaps in Crowley. A former hotbed of coalmining and cotton-weaving, the township was sandwiched between Bolton and Salford, November Division on the GMP register. It had definitely seen better days, the glory years of muck and brass having long departed. Most of its factories were closed, either boarded up or redeveloped into carpet warehouses, while its collieries were totally gone, pitheads and washeries dismantled, even some of the slagheaps and derelict brows flattened and built over, though for the most part these remained as barren, grey scars, sometimes covering hundreds of unusable acres.

The Aggies was typical. A hummocky moonscape dotted with the ruins of abandoned industry, no road led over it. Lying between inner Crowley and Bullwood (an outer district that was almost as depressed as Hatchwood Green), it was rectangular in outline, which meant that someone trying to get clean across it on foot, so long as he knew his way, had a reasonable chance of reaching the other side ahead of someone in a car, as the latter would have to drive the long way around. And it wasn’t as if Lucy could activate the blues and twos. At its lower, western end, the Aggies terminated in a swampy region caused by a polluted overflow of the River Irwell, and a mass of black and twisted girders marking out the remnants of the old Bleachworks, which had burned to cinders twenty years ago. Aside from that, it was wide open down there – there were no other houses, and the stretch of road looping through that section, Pimbo Lane, was unlit, so anyone crossing the Aggies from south to north, especially on the higher section in the middle, would clearly spot the police car’s beacon as it raced around to intercept him.

But if nothing else, the day and the hour were in the officers’ favour. All the way down Darthill Road, they met not a single vehicle coming the opposite way, and as they swerved onto Pimbo, only a night-bus cruised past, and its driver had the sense to pull into the kerb to allow them swifter passage.

Meanwhile, messages crackled on the force radio. They broke constantly and the static was loud, but it was just about possible to glean from them that the AP, who had only just turned eighteen, had suffered facial injuries and wounds to her neck and chest, but that otherwise she was safe and well. Apparently, she’d described her assailant as somewhere in his late twenties, blond-haired and wearing a green tracksuit with white piping. Peabody scribbled this down as Lucy steered them at reckless speed along the swing-back lane.

They arrived in Bullwood five minutes later, Lucy slowing to a crawl and knocking the headlights off as the BMW prowled from one darkened side street to the next. She’d zeroed in on several rows of terraced houses, each one of which terminated at the edge of the Aggies. Superficially, you couldn’t gain access to the wasteland from any of these residential streets – in some cases there were garages there, in others wire-mesh fencing had been erected. But the local urchins enjoyed their desolate playground too much to tolerate that. Thanks to the various holes they’d made over the years, passage through was easily possible if you knew where it was.

The only question now was did their suspect know all that?

Assuming he had come this way at all.

The first three streets were bare of life, nothing but cars lining the fronts of the identical red brick terraces. Most house lights were now off, given that it was almost midnight. But in the fourth street, Windermere Avenue, they glimpsed movement, a dark figure sauntering out of sight into the mouth of a cobbled alley. Lucy turned her radio down to the minimum and indicated that Peabody should do the same, before cruising on past the top of the road and pulling sharply up before the next street, Thirlmere Place.

‘Leave your helmet off,’ she whispered, opening her door.

Peabody nodded and slipped out onto the road, just as a walking man appeared from Thirlmere, turned sharp right and receded away along the pavement. It was difficult to distinguish details in the dull streetlamps, but he wore a light-coloured T-shirt, which fitted snugly around a muscular, wedge-shaped torso. More important than any of this, he also wore tracksuit bottoms, and had a tracksuit top tied around his waist by its sleeves.

If this was the guy, one might have expected him, on hearing the chug of the engine, to try to hide, but instead he was going for “normality”, Lucy realised; rather than skulking in some backstreet and probably drawing more attention to himself, looking to brazen it out by hiding in plain sight – like he was just an everyday Joe on his way home.

They walked after him, padding lightly but gaining ground quickly, hands tight on their duty belts; Lucy clutched her CS canister, Peabody the hilt of his extendable Autolock Baton. When five yards behind, they saw sweat gleaming on their target’s thick bull-neck, dampening his fair, straw-like hair. They could also see his tracksuit properly – it was green with white piping.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ Lucy said. ‘Can I talk to you?’

He walked on, not turning, not even flinching at the sound of her voice.

They closed the gap, at any second expecting him to bolt.

‘Excuse me, sir … we’re police officers and we need to speak to you.’

What Lucy didn’t expect was for him to whirl around and throw a massive punch at her, but she was now so used to these situations that her reactions sat on a hair-trigger. She ducked the blow and wrapped her arms around his waist.

‘MALCOLM!’ she shouted.

Peabody might have been a newbie, but he threw himself forward and crooked his own arms around the assailant’s bullet-shaped head, crushing his Neanderthal features in a brutal bear-hug, and at the same time dropping down with his full weight, dragging the guy to the pavement. The three of them landed heavily, the suspect on top of Peabody, Lucy front-down on top of the suspect. The two men got the worst of it, the suspect primarily as Lucy dug her left elbow into his solar plexus and drew her CS spray with her right hand, ejecting its contents into his gagging, choking face. He squawked and convulsed. With a satisfying click, Peabody snapped one bracelet onto his brawny left wrist.

‘You’re locked up, you bastard!’ Lucy gasped down at him as he writhed, using her right forearm to compress his throat. ‘You’re bloody locked up!’ She put her radio mic to her lips. ‘1485 to Three … re. the attack at the phone-box on Darthill Road. One detained at the junction of Pimbo Lane and Thirlmere Place. Require immediate supervision and prisoner transport, over.’

‘Pig-slut!’ the prisoner choked. ‘You’ll fucking die for this …’

‘What did you say?’ Lucy asked, levering herself backwards now that Peabody, who was clearly stronger and handier than he looked, had got both the prisoner’s hands cuffed behind his back. She grabbed the guy’s throat in a gloved claw. ‘Eh?’

‘Nothing,’ he gagged. ‘For Christ’s sake … I said nothing!’

‘Nah …’ She shook her head. ‘Sounded to me like your response to caution was “okay, I did it … you’ve got me banged to rights”. Did you hear that confession too, PC Peabody?’

‘Absolutely, PC Clayburn,’ Peabody replied. He wasn’t just handier than he looked, Malcolm Peabody, he was in the right job too. ‘Abso-bloody-lutely!’

Chapter 3

Lucy groaned with relief as she stripped her gear off in the female locker room: the straight-leg combat trousers, the duty belt with its various appointments, the stab vest, the radio harness, the high-viz jacket. After twenty hours on duty it all seemed a dead weight. She stepped gratefully into the shower and braced herself against the cubicle wall as the hot spray lashed over her.

Making an important arrest just before the end of shift always guaranteed you hours of overtime, which was sometimes a good thing if you needed the extra cash, but was rarely desirable when it kept you busy all night. Lucy checked the time as she towelled down, and then climbed into her underwear and picked up her motorbike leathers. It was almost eight. Beyond the confines of the locker room, the rest of the station was humming with life, but given that the morning team were now out and about, she had this quiet little space to herself. At least, she thought she did.

‘PC Clayburn?’ a voice said.

Lucy glanced around, surprised to see that while she’d been in the shower cubicle, an Indian woman, somewhere in her early fifties, had entered the locker room and was now perched on a bench near the door, fiddling with an iPad.

‘Who’s asking?’ Lucy said.

‘Oh good … hostility from the word-off.’ The Indian lady stood up, stiffly and rather painfully, and dug into her coat pocket. ‘Just what I’m in the mood for.’

Lucy eyed her warily. Whoever she was, she was plump featured, with a short, squat stature, her thick, greying hair tied in a single, rope-like ponytail. She wore a heavy waxed jacket over jeans and a scruffy grey sweatshirt. The look didn’t especially suit her. Most likely it wouldn’t suit anyone of that barrel-shaped built. But for this reason alone Lucy now suspected she was in the presence of someone who’d reached a stage in their career where appearance counted for little compared to reputation.

The newcomer flipped open a leather wallet to reveal her warrant card.

‘“Priya” to my friends, “Detective Superintendent Nehwal” to you. I appreciate you’ve been on all night, PC Clayburn, but I’d like a quick word if poss … without the attitude.’

‘Certainly, ma’am. If …’ Lucy was briefly tongue-tied. She didn’t know DSU Priya Nehwal personally, but she certainly knew about her. Everyone knew about her. ‘If … if I can just finish getting dressed …?’

Nehwal glanced at her watch, as if this itself was an imposition. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

Priya Nehwal was a thirty-year veteran and ace thief-taker, a status for which she’d been decorated many times. She was now one of the most senior investigators in Greater Manchester’s Serious Crimes Division, having solved many more high-level offences – like murder, rape, robbery and arson – than anyone else currently serving. She was something of a poster-child for the women entering the job, especially Asian women.

Lucy hurried to finish getting dressed, and left the building through its side personnel-door, rucksack on her back, crimson motorcycle helmet tucked under one arm. The aptly named Robber’s Row wasn’t just a police station but the N Division’s administrative HQ, and as such a massive multi-floored redbrick monstrosity of a building, which occupied an enormous plot of land running alongside Tarwood Lane, the main thoroughfare into Crowley from Salford. It shared a forecourt with the local fire station, though when Lucy walked out there, nobody was waiting for her. She checked in the personnel car park at the rear of the nick, and even around the garages and in the vehicle pound, but again it was no dice. She finally found Nehwal some ten minutes later, in the small park on the other side of Tarwood Lane, where she’d unwrapped a plastic bag and was breaking up a squishy cheese-barm, fragments of which she scattered for the ducks clustered at the pond’s edge.

She didn’t bother looking round when Lucy approached.

‘Ma’am?’ Lucy finally said, feeling strangely self-conscious.

At a slim five foot eight, physically fit, with long black hair and handsome, feline looks as yet unlined by her years of police service, Lucy was aware that she cut quite a dash, especially when kitted out in the leathers she wore to ride her gleaming red Ducati Monster M900. But the presence of a living legend like Priya Nehwal, however much a ragamuffin she was in appearance, made Lucy feel gawky and awkward. It didn’t help, of course, that Nehwal had blazed a trail for female detectives though many decades of impressive work, and that Lucy had completely ruined her own CID chances in the very first week.

‘Heard you had a good lock-up last night?’ Nehwal said.

Lucy shrugged. ‘Common sense bobbying, ma’am.’

‘And now you’re the woman of the moment.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, ma’am.’

Nehwal brushed crumbs from her hands and scrunched the plastic wrapper into her coat pocket. ‘Neither would I … but when you’re back on Division you’ve got to talk the talk.’

She pulled on a pair of fingerless woollen gloves. It was October 15th, and though it had been a mild month so far, this particular morning was fresh to the point of chilliness.

‘Is this something important, ma’am?’ Lucy asked. ‘Only I’ve just finished a double-length shift …’

‘Ready for bed, are you?’

‘Well … the armchair. No point going to bed when I’m not actually on nights, but a couple of hours can’t hurt.’

‘Yes, well … sorry to rain on your parade, PC Clayburn, but sleep may not come so easily after this. Even so, it’ll be your call.’ Nehwal produced a morning paper, unrolled it and offered it to her. ‘What do you think?’

Lucy gazed at the front page, which in a massive banner-headline, read:

JILL THE RIPPER!

Underneath it, colour photographs depicted two side-by-side images. One was of a rural lay-by with a silver-black Lexus LS 430 parked in the middle, CSIs in Tyvek unspooling incident tape around it. The second one, clearly shot from a helicopter, displayed woodland from a high angle, with a red circle indicating an only partly visible forensics tent erected beneath the cover of the trees, and more diminutive Tyvek-clad figures.

An equally eye-catching sub-header read:

Police bosses admit Lay-by Murders could be work of female serial killer

Beneath that, a tower of grainy, black-and-white headshots portrayed mass murderesses from former decades: Myra Hindley on top, with Beverley Allitt and Joanna Dennehy underneath. The opening paragraph to the sensationalist lead read:

In a stunning turnabout, senior detectives investigating the brutal sex-murders of four men are considering what might at one time have been unthinkable – that the perpetrator could be a woman!

The recent Lay-by Murders have been occurring across the north-west of England at a rate of one a month, with the latest victim, Ronald Ford (48), a garage owner from Warrington, found dead last week off a secluded road near Abram in Greater Manchester. All had been brutally beaten and repeatedly stabbed …

Lucy glanced up. ‘So you’re not looking for a gay suspect anymore?’

Nehwal shrugged as she fiddled with her iPad. ‘I never thought we were, if I’m honest. None of the victims were known or even suspected to be homosexuals. I know some men lead double lives, but four of them one after another without a hint of it in their background? Seemed progressively less likely the more we were able to put names to their emasculated corpses.’

‘So you’re now looking for a woman? Seriously?’

‘Shocking thought, eh? That there are girls out there as badly behaved as the boys.’

‘But this is correct, ma’am? You’re hunting a female sex murderer?’

‘We’re hunting a lunatic, PC Clayburn. The fact it’s a woman is no more a problem for me that if it was a man. Evil knows no gender.’

‘I get that, but it’d be a rarity … surely?’

‘First time for everything.’ Nehwal turned the iPad around. A grainy video was playing. ‘Couple of days ago, we recovered this CCTV footage from the slip road connecting a filling station outside Atherton to the A579.’

At first, the moving picture wasn’t easily distinguishable. The camera was clearly located some distance from the slip-lane, but the image had been enhanced sufficiently to display a vehicle cruising down it, and slowing and stopping just before it reached the main drag. Here, a female figure – female because it had longish, fair hair under a beret-like hat, an hourglass shape and, by the looks of it, was wearing a tight skirt or dress, and high heels – approached from the verge, spoke to the driver through an open passenger window, and then climbed in. After that, the car sped away.

‘Lexus 430,’ Lucy observed.

‘Correct,’ Nehwal said. ‘Belonged to Ronald Ford, the last victim – the next time anyone saw him, apart from the murderer, he was lying dead with his skull bashed in and his dick and balls severed.’

Lucy pondered that. It certainly matched the MO. So far, the APs had all been found in isolated locations but close to busy roads. In each case they had been beaten with a blunt instrument like a hammer, which was thought to have rendered them semi-conscious. They had then had their genitals cut away. Most had died from the subsequent blood loss, though one had also suffered a severely fractured skull, and might already have been dead when he was mutilated.

Though these horrible eviscerations were widely known about inside the police, the taskforce had deliberately been vague with the press, publicising that in all cases death was caused in the same way: first, blows to the head to weaken the subject, and then knife-wounds to the lower abdomen to finish him off. That latter detail wasn’t untrue of course, but they’d withheld it that the sexual organs had been removed in order to weed out any serial confessors, of whom there had already been several since the news had broken that a new killer was on the loose.

There were lots of questions here, though.

‘Gave the nice old lady who was out for an early morning walk with her poodle a turn that she’s never likely to recover from,’ Nehwal added conversationally.

Lucy said nothing as she watched the video play through a second time and a third.

‘You look doubtful,’ Nehwal said.

‘It’s nothing, ma’am … just, wasn’t the second victim a big heavy bloke?’

‘That’s right. Larry Pupper, a lorry driver. Weighed in at about twenty-five stone. We found him just off the East Lancs, near Worsley.’

‘And yet I seem to remember reading that he’d been dragged something like a hundred yards before being dumped in some thickets.’

‘You’ve been following the case, PC Clayburn?’

‘You can’t get away from it. It’s all over social media.’

‘Well, wait till this story hits Facebook. Jill the Ripper, eh? You can’t beat a novelty, even where serial killers are concerned. Anyway, yes … that lorry driver thing was easier to understand when we thought we were looking for a bloke, but there are as many oddities in this case as there are theories.’

‘Could the killer be a cross-dresser maybe?’

‘Got a good figure if he is.’ Nehwal closed the iPad. ‘It isn’t a bloke, though. There’s been no semen found at any of the murder scenes. Okay, that isn’t uncommon with sex crimes these days given the public’s knowledge about DNA evidence. But killers are rarely as careful as they like to think they are. More telling is the footprint we identified.’

‘I didn’t realise we had,’ Lucy said.

‘We’re sitting on it,’ Nehwal replied. ‘For the time being at least. There was a whole mess of footprints in the area surrounding all the murder scenes. Most were boot or trainer prints. Hardly unusual given that they were on or near to public footpaths. But then we found the imprint of a high-heeled shoe close to Ronnie Ford’s body. That would be uncommon in a woodland area, which made it suspicious. However, it was only identified as a size seven, which meant that it most likely had been left by a woman rather than a man.’

‘If it’s a woman she’d have to be unusually strong.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Or she’s got company …?’

‘We’ve considered that, but serial killers working team-handed are even rarer than go-it-alone women.’ Nehwal tapped her iPad. ‘And as we have to go where the evidence leads us, at present we’re only looking for one.’

‘So that little miss on the video is your prime suspect?’

‘I wouldn’t call her little. Even allowing for her heels, we estimate she stands about six feet. Plus she’s stacked, as you saw for yourself.’

‘Prozzie?’

‘Most likely.’ Nehwal sniffed. ‘Could be a hitcher, but a tight skirt and high heels … you ever known a hippy chick hit the road dressed like that?’

‘If nothing else, it should be easy enough tracing her.’

‘On the contrary …’ Nehwal cracked a cynical half-smile. ‘It’s proving anything but. Surprisingly so. And there are other complicating factors. Hammond, Pupper and now Ford were all killed in Greater Manchester, but Graham Cummins, the third victim was found in a ditch near Southport, which is in Merseyside, having apparently picked his murderer up – we think – just outside Preston, which is in Lancs. So before you ask, their lordships are about to announce Operation Clearway, a specialist taskforce comprising officers from all three forces.’

Lucy nodded. ‘And, just out of interest … why are you telling me?’

‘It’s simple.’ Nehwal slid her iPad back into one of her apparently capacious pockets. ‘We need women, and lots of them. Younger women, preferably … but they’ll need at least a bit of experience.’ She eyed Lucy carefully. ‘You tick both those boxes.’

‘You’re aware, ma’am, that my last CID attachment was a bit of a disaster?’

‘Yeah, but that’s not an issue. You won’t have an investigative role.’

‘Okay, so let me see …’ Lucy’s brief thrill of interest rapidly deflated. She arched an eyebrow. ‘When you say you want young women, you mean you want secretaries to run the MIR?’

‘Erm … no.’ Nehwal cracked another smile, again minus humour. ‘The job you’ll be doing won’t be anything like as clean and safe as that.’

‘Decoys then? You want undercover decoy units?’

‘Well … you won’t be decoys as such. The killer’s not targeting women. But unfortunately, if you take this job it still means you’re going to be out there in your tarty gear, rubbing shoulders with the girls who work the roads.’

‘Covert enquiries?’

‘Basically. Hang around with them, talk to them, make friends. Collate as much intel as you can.’

‘Sounds like a pretty desperate ploy.’

‘No …’ Nehwal re-rolled the newspaper. ‘This was a desperate ploy. Releasing that it’s a woman to the press. But the new footage means the time’s come to openly warn the travelling salesman crowd. So we’re not just in the papers, we’ll be on all the news bulletins too. Whether it works’ll be anyone’s guess. Some of these fellas couldn’t keep it in their pants if a one-eyed hunchback flashed her knockers at them. But basically you’re right … we’ve got to nip this thing in the bud right now.’

‘What’s the actual process going to be?’

‘Just what I say.’ Nehwal headed towards the park gate. ‘Start pretending you’re a hooker. You’ll each have a bodyguard, of course. We’re bringing a few Tactical Support Group lads in. A couple will be parked up covertly wherever you’re walking your pitch. Others’ll be driving round undercover. They’ll pick you up from time to time. Make it look like you’re working. But I’m not going to pretend it isn’t going to be a bag of crap. You’ll have nasty-piece-of-work johns to deal with, not to mention hostile pimps and aggressive suspicion from the real working girls. And a lot of the time you’ll have to deal on your own. We can’t have the TSG monkeys showing their hand for every little thing. It’s going to need to get very tasty indeed before we blow our cover. But you’ve done this sort of thing before, haven’t you?’

‘Ish,’ Lucy replied.

They reached the edge of the pavement. Rush-hour vehicles trundled back and forth in front of the towering Victorian façade of Robber’s Row.

‘Just don’t take too long making your mind up,’ Nehwal said. ‘We go live on Monday, and before then I’ve got to see twenty other girls.’

‘Any chance there’s a way back into CID for me, ma’am?’ Lucy wondered. ‘I mean if this thing comes off.’

Nehwal mused. ‘We never say “never”.’

‘They more or less said “never” when I fouled up last time.’

‘Jill the Ripper has changed every priority, PC Clayburn.’ Nehwal strode forward as a break opened in the traffic. ‘All bets are off from now on. Anything can happen.’

Chapter 4

Lucy was home by nine, though, strictly speaking, it was her mother’s home. Several years ago, Lucy had bought herself a bungalow on Cuthbertson Court, in another part of town. It was little more than a crash pad really, and at the time she’d acquired it mainly as an investment with a possible view to renting it out at some point. It had been in a poor state of repair back then, and to an extent it still was, Lucy increasingly seeing it as a long-term project, something she could slowly but surely refurbish when she finally got around to it. Whatever she opted to do with it when it was finally finished, in the meantime she was still in her old bedroom in her mother’s small terraced house in Saltbridge, another former mill district close to the border with Bolton.

She yawned as she wheeled her Ducati through the back gate, and opened what had once been the coal bunker but now had been adapted into a shed with a felt and plastic-lined waterproof roof. She pushed the vehicle into the interior, which, though unlit and stinking of oil, was all very orderly. The tools with which she maintained the majestic beast were arrayed neatly on the walls. There were cleaning materials on the shelves, and several spare canisters of Ultimate Unleaded stored in a locker in the corner.

As Lucy closed and padlocked the shed door behind her, her mother stepped out from the kitchen. Whereas Lucy was dark-haired and coltish in build, Cora Clayburn was fair haired and buxom. She’d been quite a beauty in her day, or so Lucy would imagine – she had to imagine, because they had no other living relatives and she knew no friends from her mother’s early life who could confirm this. Though age was catching up a little – Cora was now fifty-three and a lot of that lovely fair hair was running to silver – she was still trim and shapely, an appearance she preserved through careful eating and regular exercise. Lucy had always thought that her mum looked amazing in the pink Lycra top and tight, black tracksuit bottoms she wore each day for her five-mile evening constitutional. Less attractive, though, was the shapeless blue smock with the plastic name tag she was currently clad in for her role as assistant manager at the Saltbridge MiniMart.

‘Now?’ Cora said, looking relieved. Shortly after midnight, Lucy had left her a message that she’d be late, but it wouldn’t have stopped her worrying. ‘Long shift, that?’

‘Yeah, but a good one.’ Lucy pulled her gauntlets off and tucked them into her helmet. ‘Bloody maniac grabbed this eighteen-year-old lass on her way home from babysitting.’

‘My God … where?’

‘Top of Darthill Road.’

Cora didn’t look surprised. ‘The Aggies?’

‘The edge of it.’

‘I wish they’d take action about that place. Build on it, or something.’

‘No chance, Mum … they’ll want to find a nice green space for that.’ Cora sidled past her and went indoors, where the mingled aromas of cooked bacon and fresh coffee set her empty stomach rumbling. ‘Anyway, the bastard – pardon my French – gave her a real smacking. Smashed her teeth, broke her nose and cheekbone.’ She unzipped her leather jacket and peeled it off the thin, sweat-damp T-shirt underneath. ‘I got him over in Bullwood. He still had her phone and purse in his pockets. Talk about banged to rights.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Cora said. ‘Who is he?’

‘A total lowlife called Wayne Crompton.’ Lucy folded her leather over the back of a kitchen chair, and stretched. ‘He’s got form as long as your arm, but this time he’ll be off the streets for a while. Charged him a couple of hours ago … robbery, GBH and attempted kidnapping.’

‘Like you said, a good night’s work.’ But Cora’s tone remained neutral, as it always did when Lucy got enthusiastic about cop stuff. ‘But I thought you were back on duty this afternoon?’

‘Was,’ Lucy confirmed. ‘Not any more. They offered me the money or the time in lieu, dropping extra-strong hints that they wanted me to take the time. So I’m going to – today.’

Cora nodded approvingly as she shrugged her mac on.

‘Mum, there’s something else I need to talk to you about,’ Lucy said.

‘Tell me quick, because I’m running a bit late.’

‘It’s okay … it’s not important.’

Cora stopped by the door. ‘Go on … I can tell you want to.’

So Lucy did, all about Operation Clearway, not specifying the exact role she’d be playing of course, but outlining the basics of the case and the new lines of enquiry the taskforce would shortly be embarking on.

Cora frowned. ‘So what are you saying … you’re a detective again?’

‘Not quite. It may be a way back for me though.’

‘I’m surprised you want a way back in after the way they treated you last time.’

‘Mum, come on … I’m lucky I’m still in the job.’

‘Some of us wouldn’t mind if you weren’t.’

‘I know that, but look –’ Lucy embraced her ‘– this is me. It’s my life, okay?’

‘Yes, yes, I know.’ Cora returned the embrace but a little stiffly. ‘And we’ve had this conversation before … so stop going on about it, you silly old trout.’

Lucy pecked her on the cheek. ‘I’ve never called you “a silly old trout”.’

‘You’ve thought it, I’m sure.’

‘The thing is, I’m mainly going to be working nights for the next few weeks.’

Cora considered this with visible apprehension.

Lucy knew why, and that it would be unrelated to her mother’s own safety.

With its edificial industrial ruins and rows of red-brick terraced houses, Saltbridge was not the most salubrious part of Crowley. Like so many working class neighbourhoods in the post-manufacturing era, it was extensively unemployed, drugs and alcoholism were rife and it suffered higher than normal crime rates. But Cora had lived here all of Lucy’s life at least, a dauntless single mum who’d never once been oppressed or intimidated by the environment in which she’d been forced to raise her child. These days, having held a management position for several years, she could probably afford to move out to the suburbs if she wanted to, but she had friends locally and was comfortable here.

‘How long will this assignment last?’ Cora asked.

‘As long as it takes. Could be a few months. But don’t worry. I’m not going to be in harm’s way.’

‘I bet you thought that last time too. And then look what happened. You were relieved you didn’t lose your job. All that mattered to me was that I didn’t lose my child.’

Lucy smiled tiredly. It was tempting to retort with the provable fact that uniformed patrol, her current role, was one of the most dangerous jobs a police officer could undertake, and that detectives didn’t encounter violent criminals half as often as bobbies on the beat did. But that would hardly help. Perhaps if Lucy had earned herself some stripes by now, or maybe an inspector’s pips, things would be different. She’d be able to con her mum into thinking that each shift was spent in the hermetically sealed environment of a supervisor’s office, rubber-stamping reports all day. But though Lucy had already passed both her sergeant’s and inspector’s exams, she hadn’t received the call just yet. Positive discrimination was a big thing in the service these days. The top brass were keen to advance the careers of their female underlings, but perhaps not when said underling was the child of a single parent from the wrong side of town – a child who didn’t even know her father, and especially not after that foul-up in Borsdane Wood.

‘So you’ll be here this evening when I get home?’ Cora said, opening the back door.

‘Certainly will. I’ll have tea ready and waiting.’

‘Lovely. That’ll make us square. Your breakfast’s in the oven.’

‘Oh cool … I’m starving.’ Lucy pulled on a padded glove and drew out the hotplate, and was delighted to see bacon, eggs, sausage, beans, grilled tomato and toast. ‘Mum! You shouldn’t have gone to this much trouble.’

‘I know I shouldn’t, but I have to make it worth your while coming home, don’t I? Otherwise one day you might not.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Lucy kissed her on the forehead. ‘Go on … you’ll be late.’

Chapter 5

An executive decision was taken to locate Operation Clearway’s Major Incident Room, or MIR as it was known in the trade, at Robber’s Row. The taskforce took residence on its top two floors, where suites of offices were available which already were well equipped and close to all necessary facilities. The MIR itself was on the lower of these, the station’s fourth floor, where the N Division’s Sports & Social Club had once been: over a hundred square yards of floor-space with a raised stage at one end and a bar at the other, though both of these were now defunct. Robber’s Row was one of the last nicks in GMP with a section-house attached, in other words sleeping quarters for junior officers. Few of these comfortable but basic one-bed domiciles were used any more; in fact most of them would need to be aired out at the very least, but the proximity to the MIR of such a purpose-built bunkhouse was perfect, given that, as promised, nearly half of the two hundred officers attached full time to Clearway had been brought in from outside the GMP area.

The whole thing would be a home from home for Lucy, who’d worked out of Robber’s Row for the last four years, ever since she’d transferred away from Cotehill Crescent, the sub-divisional nick where she’d been posted until the incident at Borsdane Wood. But the atmosphere would be different in the MIR. A little less formal perhaps, with everyone in civvies and relatively few newbies involved, but with less margin for error than would normally be tolerated. The thought of having Priya Nehwal in command was a little unnerving – she was the best, so she expected the same from her staff. But in truth, she was only one member of the top brass on Operation Clearway, Deputy SIO in fact. According to the bumph circulated by email those first couple of nights, the rest of the senior supervision would comprise Detective Chief Superintendent Jim Cavill, also from GMP’s Serious Crimes Division, who was SIO, and Detective Chief Inspector June Swanson from Merseyside, who was Office Manager. Both of these characters were unknown quantities to Lucy, so it was anyone’s guess what their overall management style would be, but given the general experience of the taskforce, it was to be hoped that it would be pretty relaxed.

It all started reasonably well that first morning.

As part of the Intel Unit, as they’d now be referred to, Lucy found her induction briefing on the top floor in what had once been the classroom where the N Division Training Officer had put probationers through their paces. From here on, this would be their base. It was airy and spacious, with rows of neatly arranged tables and chairs, and a large desk and widescreen VDU at the front. It also had a locker room attached and a small anteroom, which the DI running the Intel Unit could make use of as a private office. If nothing else, it was a relief to be in there, given that downstairs it was already a tale of chaos, taskforce detectives doing their level best to work amid the bedlam of delivery guys tramping in and out wheeling desks, filing cabinets and computer equipment, and techies hammering and banging as they installed new electrical fittings. Not that the Intel Unit didn’t feel a little crowded itself. That first day, approximately thirty young female officers were assembled there, mostly seated, while a row of fifteen blokes stood at the back.

‘Morning, everyone,’ DI Geoff Slater said from the front. ‘Chuffed to bits to see so many of you here … but if I don’t sound overly excited, apologies in advance. We’ve got a shedload of work ahead of us.’

Slater was another GMP Serious Crimes Division man, but to Lucy’s eye he looked more like a TV cop. He was somewhere in his late-thirties, tall and lean, but with an air of virility. He had a thatch of unruly black hair and rugged, lived-in looks. His shirt, tie, jacket and trousers were all vaguely rumpled. He didn’t seem especially happy: he wore a serious, rather sullen expression – and yet it all hung together nicely.

‘You all know why you’re here and what a ball-acher of a job you’re going to be doing when you’re out there,’ Slater said. ‘Hopefully you all gave deep consideration to this assignment before you stuck your hands up – I hope so at least, otherwise you might find you’re in the wrong place. I’m certainly not going to do you the disservice of trying to sugar-coat this, because that’d be a total waste of time. Likewise, I don’t want to spend time we can’t spare making formal introductions, aside from to introduce myself, which I already have done, and your two immediate line-managers, detective sergeants Sally Bryant from Merseyside and Maureen Clark from Lancashire.’

Two of the seated women stuck their hands up to indicate who they were.

‘You’ll obviously need to get to know each other,’ Slater said, ‘but you can do that on your first tea-break. You’re all wearing name-tags anyway, so that should help and there’re a couple of charts on the wall that you might find useful.’

Lucy glanced up. Among a mass of other paperwork, mainly maps and photographs with marker-pen notations all over them, there were two colour charts, one for women and one for men, each bearing ordered and neatly blown-up headshots, with essential details like name, rank, collar-number and police force of origin listed underneath. She skimmed through. Several of the women were already serving detectives, though the majority were PCs like herself. The male officers, she’d already learned, had largely been drafted from the Tactical Support Group, which meant they’d most likely be ex-military, which their burly physiques and hard, truculent faces also seemed to imply. Their role was basically to keep an eye on the women, but also to drive up in unmarked cars every so often, posing as customers, so as to maintain the illusion that the girls were working prostitutes.

‘What I will say is this,’ Slater said. ‘We’re a small but vital part of a very big operation. I’ve been a detective for sixteen years and I’ve never known a case where as many resources were being chucked around. I could put my cynical hat on and say that if we were investigating the usual type of serial murder … i.e. drug-addled hookers getting sliced ’n’ diced rather than the white, middle-class men who use their services, there wouldn’t be half as much media attention and nowhere near as much pressure on us to get a result. But I’m not going to. I don’t know if that’s the case, and frankly I don’t care.’

His gaze roved across them. His delivery was a low, taut monotone.

‘Mine’s a school of thought where all lives are valuable,’ he said. ‘Where each one that gets snuffed out leaves a hole in people’s lives that will probably never be filled. None of these fellas asked to get murdered, much less tortured. And that’s the other thing. That’s the really nasty bit … someone’s out there using a butcher’s knife to carve off these blokes’ crown jewels. Now I’m sure everyone here knows some misogynistic pillock who in one of your lighter moments you’d happily say deserves such a fate. But you’ve still got to ask yourself the question … do you really want someone wandering the streets who’s capable of this kind of sadism? I mean, disregarding the mistreatment she may have suffered at the hands of men, because that’s irrelevant to our role here … do you really want this woman walking about free? Because who gets it next? Not just the bloke who propositions her or offers her money … maybe the bloke who makes a politer approach, offering her a drink or asking her out on a date. Maybe the bloke who opens a door for her, or simply gives her a smile when he’s out walking his dog. And this is the real rub, ladies. Because when you get out there, this could be the very same person you’re swapping banter with when you’re fixing your make-up in the bus station toilets. It could be the girl standing on the next street-corner, the one who comes over every five minutes to scrounge a ciggie off you.’

He scrutinised them carefully.

‘When policewomen usually do decoy work, they’re standing among the prospective victims. This time you may be standing with the killer. And for that reason if none other, you’re going to have to stay sharp. You’ll be working four days on, three days off, four till four. You’ll not be on the same pitch all the time, though I’m not going to allocate any one of you more than two or three pitches, the whole purpose of this being that you get to know the other girls who work there … that you talk to them, find out who they think might be doing it. But for your own safety, at no time can you take your eye off the ball. I mean not once. Because if you let something slip about who you are, and Jill the Ripper picks up on it, and you’re stuck with her all night on a lonely road … I wonder who’s not going to be heading home again when the shift finally ends.’

Lucy had already considered this discomforting possibility, though by the looks on the faces of some of the others, primarily the younger girls, they hadn’t. There was no safe way to perform this kind of work. At the best of times, the women they’d be interacting with were likely to be damaged. They wouldn’t all be bad people; there’d be tired mums trying to make ends meet, students with college bills to pay, actresses and models who couldn’t get real work. But it was an unforgiving profession. There’d be thieves among them too, addicts, mental patients, disease carriers. And now one of them could be a murderer.

‘And if that hasn’t scared you shitless,’ Slater said, ‘sorry … but next up we’re going to run through the details of the enquiry. And this isn’t going to be pleasant either.’

He called various images onto the VDU as he outlined the progress thus far. As expected, the crime scene photos were graphic in the extreme, and yet, from a purely analytical perspective, there were startling similarities between them. The most recent victim, Ronald Ford, lay on his back in the roadside woods near Abram, with a pool of blood and brains beneath his broken skull, and his trousers and underpants pushed down to his shins, exposing a gore-glutted cavity where his genitals used to be. Two of the other victims, William Hammond and Graham Cummins, who were found in lay-bys near Chadderton and Southport respectively, lay in exactly the same posture, suffering from exactly the same fatal injuries. Only the second victim, Larry Pupper – the heavily built HGV driver, who’d been dragged a considerable distance – lay on his side in a muddy, litter-cluttered ditch on the outskirts of Salford. His trousers were tangled around his feet, as though he’d been trying to take them off altogether, which suggested the killer had waited until he was most off his guard in order to attack, and his face was battered savagely and extensively, implying that even then he’d put up a fight. Perhaps even after the beating, he’d struggled, which might explain why he’d needed to be dragged still further from the East Lancashire road. Whatever, it looked as if he’d died before he’d reached his final destination – in the photo he lay draped on his side, his arms twisted out of shape as though partly dislodged from their sockets. The gaping wound where his genitals had been hacked off was less bloody than the others.

Medical examiners now felt certain the actual implement used to achieve this ghastly effect was a knife with a thick, serrated blade – the sort a butcher might use to saw through bone and gristle. There were plenty other lines of enquiry too, though few had borne fruit as yet. Slater hastened through them anyway, skimping on detail where he could – primarily because this was mainly of use to the girls as background info. They had no investigative brief, and so the DI was much more interested in those factors that had potential relevance for the role they would be playing.

In which case he now summoned the mugshots of three living men onto the VDU.

‘A bit of intel on the kind of people you are likely to hear about,’ he said. ‘I doubt you’ll encounter any of these characters personally – I sincerely hope you don’t – but you definitely need to know something about them. As you’re probably aware, we have a wide range of crime syndicates trading in the north-west. But tough as they like to talk, on the whole they are all dominated by these maniacs. Anyone know who they are?’

Lucy eyed the three faces with interest. All looked to be in early middle age, but at second glance there was no doubting their chosen professions.

‘The Crew,’ one of the other girls spoke up.

‘That’s correct,’ Slater said. ‘This is the infamous Crew. For any of you who’ve spent your police service on another planet, the early noughties saw the formation of a particularly dangerous cartel here in the north-west of England … they’re known simply as the Crew, and they control most of the high-level crime in Manchester, Liverpool and various of the two cities’ satellite towns. As I say, it wasn’t always thus. Back in the day, the numerous gangsters we had up here were too busy fighting each other to actually make any money. At least, that was the case until one of our leading Manchester hoodlums –’ he indicated the middle face ‘– a certain Bill Pentecost, decided enough was enough.’

Lucy looked in fascination at the image of Bill Pentecost, the north-west’s legendary boss of bosses. At first glance there was nothing immediately brutal about him, but on closer inspection something wasn’t quite right. He was weasel-faced, with a shock of greying ‘wire-wool’ hair. His features were lean and sharp-edged, and he wore steel-framed, rectangular-lensed glasses over a pair of narrow, ice-blue eyes.

‘Pentecost started his career as a council estate money-lender,’ Slater said. ‘His trademark was extreme terror; he would punish those who failed to pay up by crucifying them on doors. But he built his larger empire on drugs and extortion, finally coming to occupy a position as one of Manchester’s top godfathers. As such, his vision gradually broadened. He decided that he’d rather make deals than engage in crazy violence, and so arranged a meeting of all the heads of the region’s main gangs, at which he proposed the set-up of a kind of overarching north-west crime faction, in which they’d all participate and which in due course would become known as “the Crew”. Members would have an equal partnership and an equal say in all major decisions affecting the governance and protection of crime in this region, the endgame being to establish permanent peace and prosperity.

‘And guess what … with a few minor exceptions, it worked. Harmony wasn’t just restored to the north-west crime network, all these years later the Crew is still the leading underworld power in this region. It’s got a controlling interest in just about every racket you can think of, and Bill Pentecost, now in his mid-fifties, is firmly cemented in place as top dog.’

He paused to take a breath, and for the first time smiled – a rather tired smile, Lucy thought, the smile of a guy so used to thinking how unfair it was that these killers were all millionaires while the average copper spent so much of his time worried about his pension that if he didn’t laugh about it he’d cry.

‘As I say, you’re unlikely to meet him,’ Slater said. ‘He never gets his own hands dirty anymore. He’s got umpteen layers of fall-guys between him and the streets, but it’s important you know who he is, because quite a few of these girls are likely to be on his pay-roll, albeit indirectly. Which brings us to the second name you need to know, and this is someone it’s just conceivable you might meet up with.’

He indicated the left-hand image. This one portrayed a younger man, perhaps only his mid-forties, but again lean and feral of feature, an impression enhanced by a vaguely insane smile. His head was completely shaved, and his eyes sunk into pits. Lucy had the notion that if some Photoshop genius added a goatee beard and a pair of antlers, it would be a perfect spit for the Devil.

‘As I say, the Crew have many rackets,’ Slater said, ‘and one of the most lucrative is the sex trade. So this is their pimp-in-chief, the ludicrously named Nick Merryweather, more accurately known as “Necktie Nicky” thanks to his preferred method of despatching those he doesn’t like. For the record, Serious Crimes Division has two unsolved murders on its books wherein the APs, both of them underworld players, were found with their throats cut and their tongues pulled out through the wound. They’re suspected to be Crew hits, and Necktie Nicky, though a Crew lieutenant rather than a soldier, was almost certainly the assassin. So this is someone to be especially wary of, though most likely, if you do your job properly, you’ll be a flyspeck beneath his notice. That’s assuming he bothers coming out to check on business. He has lots of madams and under-pimps to do that for him.’

He moved along to the third and final mugshot.

‘Now … prostitution being what it is in the age of Internet-fuelled home industry, not even a terror like Necktie Nicky can exert ownership over the entire field. He doesn’t actually run any brothels – he protects them, in other words he takes a big share of all their profits. That’s the way the Crew work, which makes it hard if not impossible to hit them with any real criminal charges. But as I said, there’s so much sex-for-sale out there now that even Nick Merryweather can’t cover the entire spectrum. So to help him, he relies on this charmer, fellow Crew lieutenant Frank McCracken.’

McCracken’s face was in some ways the scariest on show, because it was the most normal. There was a hardness about it, for sure, but he was also a handsome man, square-jawed, dark-eyed, his lightly greying hair worn in a sharp crew-cut. His eyes were chips of glass – there was no doubt that this character would kick you to death if you said a word out of place. But he too was in his fifties, and if you weren’t on the look-out for villainy, it was possible you could pass him in the street without giving him another glance.

‘Anyone know what McCracken’s official role in the Crew is?’ Slater asked.

Another girl put her hand up. ‘The Shakedown.’

‘Correct again,’ Slater replied. ‘And you even use the underworld terminology, so ten out of ten. Frank McCracken’s role in the Crew, ladies and gentlemen, is what they call “the Shakedown”. If ever a lucrative theft is committed in the north-west area, like a robbery, a high-end burglary or fraud, or if pimps, dealers and bookies are active who aren’t “officially approved”, it’s McCracken’s job to ensure the Crew gets its cut. And trust me, he’s very good at it. Some of his methods, at least those reported to us as hearsay, are beyond imagining. On the upside, McCracken is another who only comes out to play if the opposition gets serious. It’s unlikely that small-time operators like you will actually encounter him.’

He paused to look them over. Everyone was maintaining a suitably serious aspect, but quite a few of the girls, again mainly the young ones, had noticeably paled.

‘I’d imagine none of you are feeling any the less nervous after what I’ve just told you,’ Slater said. ‘Sorry about that, but how would it help if I lied? This just underlines the importance of the front you put out when you hit those streets. As I said, the Crew don’t control all the sex-for-sale in the north-west. It’s too diverse, involves too many people and is too technology-driven. From your POV it’s a good thing that you won’t be the only freelancers out there. But it’s important that each one of you gets a good cover story and gets it right – who you are, where you live, why you’re on the game, etc. In the first instance, you won’t be going out there cold. Vice have loaned us one or two working girls who also happen to be snitches – but only the most trustworthy, so that means there’s no more than a handful of them. They won’t be able to hold all your hands all the time – and at some point you are going to be asked questions. It’ll happen less out there on the fringes of town, where everything’s a bit wild and woolly, than it would on the backstreets around Piccadilly and Whalley Range, but it’s going to happen and you’re going to have to be ready for it. Now you’ll all have protectors, you know that … but some crap you’ll just have to deal with. Any questions so far?’

‘Most punters would be surprised to learn there’s any kind of prostitution out on the road networks,’ one of the girls said. ‘People drive around all day and never see anything.’

‘That’s true,’ Slater replied. ‘We’re going to train you up on that as well. Because you start openly touting at some service stations and you’ll be locked up by Traffic before you can say “Cynthia Payne”. It’s the quieter spots the girls tend to work from: lay-bys, lorry parks, picnic areas – especially at night, when they’re deep in shadow. Again … sorry not to sweeten this for you, but it’s in those shadows where you’ll need to be. And it isn’t going to be nice.’

They broke for coffee at around eleven, and were on their way down to the canteen when Slater sidled up alongside Lucy.

‘PC Clayburn, is it?’ he asked.

Lucy waited to let the others pass. ‘That’s right, sir.’

He stopped next to her. ‘You were the one involved in the Mandy Doyle incident?’

Lucy’s heart sank, but there was never any option these days other than to admit her error and hope to brazen it out. ‘Right again, sir.’

He regarded her with an odd kind of indifference, which she found more unnerving than she would if he’d been openly angry. ‘So … what?’ he said. ‘You just admit it like that? No excuses? No convoluted self-justification?’

‘None whatever, sir. I dropped a total bollock, and that’s why I’m here now … I’m trying to make up for it.’

He readjusted the pile of paperwork under his arm. ‘I worked with Mandy Doyle on the Drugs Squad. We were partners for three years.’

Lucy’s cheeks reddened. ‘I’m just glad she’s alive, sir.’

‘So am I.’ He yanked at his tie to loosen it even more. ‘She’s an idiot, by the way. Always was.’

Lucy thought she’d misheard. ‘Sir?’

‘Mandy,’ he explained. ‘Spent her entire career trying to prove she’s as tough as the lads. Made up for her lack of imagination with a bolshiness that extended right across the board. Difficult enough when you were a similar rank. But if you were lower, you could expect to put up with a whirlwind of shit. But why am I telling you that, eh?’

Lucy was temporarily lost for words. ‘I … didn’t know her that well.’

He shrugged. ‘Lucky you. Or unlucky. She obviously had to blame someone once she went and got herself shot.’

‘Strictly speaking, sir, it was me who went and …’

‘Uh-uh.’ He shook his head. ‘I read all about it, PC Clayburn. You had a guy in custody on suspicion of raping and brutalising an old lady, yeah? But by his own admission, and as later excavation of the deposition site revealed, he’d also murdered two young women. That should have put him in a different category. That meant he was physically pretty adept, and yet your gaffer went and left you – five days into CID – on your own, handcuffed to him.’

‘There was a police driver …’

‘The driver’s irrelevant. He was in a separate compartment of the vehicle.’

With Radio One playing, Lucy reminded herself.

‘He couldn’t necessarily have known what was going on in the back,’ Slater added. ‘Even if Haygarth hadn’t produced a gun, he might still have overpowered you.’

‘I was still a police officer, sir.’

‘Your loyalty to DI Doyle is touching, if a tad misplaced. She spent the next year saying you’d almost got her killed, when the reality was exactly the opposite – it was her who almost got you killed.’

Lucy preferred not to ponder that, even though her mum had – excessively. You didn’t dice with death every day as a copper, but it happened more often than in most civilian occupations. It didn’t pay to dwell on the near misses, to wonder what might have happened rather than what did happen. That was a sure-fire way to cost you your nerve for future such situations. But sometimes it was an effort to suppress those distracting thoughts.

‘You never should have been left in that vehicle on your own,’ Slater concluded.

‘I still looked the other way when I shouldn’t have.’

‘Oh hell …’ For the first time, Slater’s blank expression slackened; he almost smiled. ‘I wouldn’t have fancied watching a scrote like that take a piss either. The fact is there should have been two of you, minimum. And that was Mandy Doyle’s fault. She had tactical command, so she ought to have taken care of it.’

‘I’m glad you see it that way, sir. Not everyone does.’

‘Shit, Lucy …’ He walked again; she followed. ‘You know what this job’s like. Fill a form in wrong and it can follow you for the rest of your career if it suits someone’s purpose. But DI Doyle’s gone now on a medical, so theoretically that’s a clean slate for you.’

‘I want to get back into CID.’

‘I know. Priya told me.’

‘Can you and DSU Nehwal make it happen?’

‘Is that your burning ambition?’ he asked. It sounded like a genuine question.

‘It’s what I joined up for in the first place.’

This time he did smile. ‘So what were you watching as a kid? Cagney and Lacey? Prime Suspect? No offence intended … with me it was Miami Vice.’

‘Yeah, well … I guess we all got a bit of a shock when the reality hit us.’

‘Telling me. Anyway, the truth is, Lucy, we need detectives. Urgently … and I mean everywhere. Special units too, not just Division. Too many people are joining up these days who are only interested in fast-track promotion, and CID’s the wrong place for that.’ He halted at the entrance to the canteen. ‘So if you’re serious, and you do a job for us … we might be able to assist. It’s early days though. I mean we’ve got to catch a killer first.’

‘And you really think the Intel Unit’s going to have a role in that, sir?’ she asked. ‘Isn’t it more likely forensics’ll nab her? Or some good old-fashioned detective work?’

He shrugged as he walked inside. It was already noisy and crowded, mainly with plain clothes and civvie admin staff from the MIR, though uniforms and traffic wardens occupied some of the tables. They threaded their way through to the service counter with difficulty.

‘We’re dealing with someone who’s deadly serious about what she’s doing,’ Slater said over his shoulder. ‘You can tell that by the scorecard she’s racking up. It’s always going to be shoe-leather that brings someone like that to heel. Whether that’s Plod going door-to-door, detectives bouncing around the MIR having great ideas, or you lasses walking those grubby roads in your kinky boots … it doesn’t really matter.’

‘We just nab her any way we can.’

‘Correct.’

But Lucy was under no illusion. Slater was clearly disposed to be her friend – possibly because, at thirty, she was older and more experienced than most of the other Intel Unit girls and maybe, therefore, was someone he felt he could look to. The Mandy Doyle incident aside, her record was pretty good – so that could only help. Alternately, he might just fancy her. But even that was tolerable if, when all this was over, it meant he and Priya Nehwal could exert some influence in her favour. And by the sounds of it, there was one sure way to make that happen – feel the collar of Jill the Ripper.

No pressure then.

Chapter 6

‘You sure no one’s going to see us?’ Barney wondered tautly.

Kev rolled his eyes in that exasperated way he’d so perfected during the many years of their relationship. ‘You tell me, Barn. Who’s actually going to see us? Look …’ He pointed through the van window at a patch of diminutive lights twinkling some distance away. ‘That’s Bickershaw.’ Now he pointed in the other direction, indicating a similar scattering of lights, so distant in this case that they were only noticeable because all other landscape features were hidden by the autumn darkness. ‘And that’s Leigh. So where are we, Barn?’

Barney didn’t know for sure, even though he’d driven them both here in his uncle’s shuddery old van. The truth was he didn’t even think this area of wasteland had a name. As far as he could recall from his daylight travels, it was a patch of emptiness lying just east of the B5237.

He shrugged, helpless to answer.

‘A shit-tip where nobody lives,’ Kev said irritably. ‘Where you’d be lucky to find rats, because rats are generally not that fucking stupid. Nobody wants this place. So not only is no one likely to see us … why should it matter if anyone does?’

Even to Barney – who was a bigger, heavier lad than Kev, but tended by instinct to defer to his lifelong mate on all matters where complex thought was required – the answer to this one was more than obvious.

‘Because it’s public land and fly-tipping’s illegal.’

Kev snorted. ‘But it was alright to dig coal mines out here, wasn’t it? And dump mountains of slag?’

‘I’m just saying,’ Barney cautioned. ‘Let’s be careful.

‘We’ll be careful. But for fuck’s sake, don’t let these bastards guilt-trip you.’

‘These bastards’ was Kev’s signature phrase, and his catch-all term for anyone he perceived to have higher control than himself, be they employers, bailiffs, police officers, the local authority, central Government itself, or anyone at all who qualified in his mind as part of the establishment.

‘Hypocrites, the lot of ’em,’ he ranted on. ‘If they wanted a rubbish tip out here they’d soon okay it …’

‘I said alright!’ Barney didn’t normally interrupt his mate in mid-flow, but of the two of them, he, ultimately, had most reason to be nervous.

They’d spent the whole of that dreary Sunday clearing out Kev and Lorna’s new flat, which the couple were about to move into at mates’ rates because its owner was Lorna’s brother-in-law. He’d offered to lower the asking price even more if they disposed of the pile of rubbish that the previous tenants, a bunch of art students at the local Technical College, had left behind. There were boxes of broken brushes, paint pots, turps bottles, easels, torn canvases, along with the ruined carpet from the main lounge, the festering contents of several bins, two mattresses, and even the bedding as well.

It had been a lot more work than the two lads had expected, taking them several hours to bring it all downstairs and load it into the back of Barney’s uncle’s van, which ensured that all the municipal recycling centres were closed by the time it came to dump the stuff. Having opted – at Kev’s insistence – for this other, simpler solution, it now looked as if they’d be at least another hour out here, on a one-time colliery wasteland which it had been quite a challenge just to access. They’d prowled its edges for half an hour or so, both driver and passenger tensing every time another vehicle drove past, before locating a track of sorts. This was little more than a ribbon of rutted, rubbly ground, but at least it was driveable and it led away from the B5237 in a straight line, running a couple of hundred yards before terminating in front of what looked like a burned-out Portakabin.

They halted here, and even though it was a desolate spot, the undefined outlines of rocks and stunted vegetation standing left and right, the pale flood of their headlights picked out a muddy footpath on the other side of the ruin. Barney was glad they were at least away from the road. He switched his headlights off and climbed out, glancing around and listening, before walking to the rear and opening the van doors.

Kev went with him, saying nothing as he dug into the mountain of refuse inside, hefting out a box filled with bric-a-brac, and strutting away through the gutted shell of the Portakabin. Almost by unspoken agreement, they’d decided to chuck the stuff somewhere on the far side of it, using the broken structure as a final shield between themselves and the road. But as Kev vanished along the meandering path beyond it, Barney thought he heard something.

He spun around.

A clacking, or clicking.

Most likely it had been branches rattling in a gust of wind.

There wasn’t much starlight penetrating the cloud-cover, but his eyes were finally adjusting to what little there was. Scrub-like thorn breaks were clumped to either side of the track, interspersed here and there by the odd stunted tree; the sort of charmless, twisted vegetation you saw so often on former coal-tips like this but rarely anywhere else. His vision didn’t spear very far into it – a few yards, but that was sufficient to show nothing moving.

Barney shuddered as he zipped his fleece. This desolation was the last place he wanted to be in right now. It was ten o’clock at night, and the nearest habitation – either Bickershaw or Leigh – were both miles away.

‘You’re one to talk about guilt-trips,’ Barney mumbled as he humped a roll of heavy, stinky lino onto his shoulder and stumbled through the Portakabin, following the same route as Kev. ‘Reminding me I owed you a few quid from when I was short, and calling this an opportunity to pay you back. It was only a few quid, lad.’

Naked bushes clawed at him as he pressed along the path beyond the ruin. Some sixty yards later, it opened out onto a flatter, harder surface – what had once been the concrete floor to another industrial unit.

‘This’ll do, here,’ Kev said from just ahead, as he dumped his load in a kind of unofficial centre-spot. Barney followed suit. They stood there, breathless, glancing round.

The B5237 was about three hundred yards behind them. The streetlights over the top of it were just barely visible, but their own vehicle was concealed by the trees and undergrowth.

‘Tell you what,’ Kev said in a “go on, I’ll humour you” kind of tone. ‘If it’s really bothering you, why don’t we build it all up into a bommy? I mean, it’s Bonfire Night in a couple of weeks. If some copper comes wandering around here, he’ll probably just think its kids. Won’t cock a snook at it.’

‘If you say so,’ Barney said, not feeling convinced.

‘There’ll be bommies everywhere this time next week. We’ll completely fox the bastards.’

Barney nodded again, before noticing that Kev was watching him – and only belatedly realising that this meant it was going to be his job to construct said bommy. While Kev lurched back along the path towards the van, he got to work, piling the rubbish together, and then looking for spare bits of timber with which he could form that distinctive pyramid shape.

A few minutes later, job done, Barney was also on his way back to the van. They passed each other in the process, Kev’s arms wrapped around a bulging bin-liner. They passed each other again a short time later, Barney this time hefting a couple of armfuls. And so it went on, the two of them working in relays until Barney was headed back to the van for what seemed like the fifth and surely final time – only to stop dead when he came in sight of it.

Because another vehicle was now parked at its rear.

Blocking it in.

The only conclusion – the only conclusion possible – was coppers.

For half a second, Barney’s world collapsed. He felt his bowels shrivel inside him. It wasn’t a serious offence, fly-tipping … except that he was currently on probation for pinching lead off a church roof. And he had no idea how much another conviction, even a minor one, might damage his chances of staying out of jail.

But now, slowly, he began to notice things that reassured him a little.

In the dimness, he couldn’t distinguish much about the car parked behind his van – he could only see the offside of it, and he certainly couldn’t identify its make or colour. But there were no Battenberg flashes down its flanks. Nor was there any kind of beacon or visi-flasher on top of it. That didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a police car, but its engine had been switched off and there were no headlights showing. Surely, if they were coppers, they’d still be sitting inside, waiting for the miscreants to come back?

Barney trod forward warily. Even drawing closer, it wasn’t possible in this gloom to determine whether or not someone was inside it. But then a voice addressed him.

‘Excuse me … can you help?’

He swung right, to find a woman sliding into view around the front nearside of the van.

Barney was shaken to see anyone at all, but this lady was the last person he’d have expected. Even in the dimness, she was a stunner: quite tall, an impression enhanced by her high-heeled boots and long, shapely legs, which were clad in spray-on black leggings. Her hands were tucked into the pockets of a shiny, silvery anorak, which was partly unzipped, exposing the best amount of cleavage he’d seen since last accessing the Butts & Boobs section of SexHub. She had a pretty face as well, and a nice smile. What looked like an awful lot of blonde hair was tucked beneath a smart black beret.

‘Erm … miss?’ he stammered.

‘I said can you help me?’

Barney remained tongue-tied; he was smitten. But it now struck him that whoever this lady was, she was still a potential witness to his crime. Even if she failed to recognise him again, she might recognise the registration mark on the van. Trust him to let bleeding Kev talk him into using his uncle’s vehicle.

‘I’ve broken down, you see,’ the woman said, apparently oblivious to all this. ‘I don’t know what it was but I just kept losing power and stalling. I’d only just managed to get off the road when I saw your vehicle. I could really use someone to look at the engine.’

‘Look at the engine …? I’m, whoa … I’m not a mechanic.’

‘Please help,’ she said, her smile faltering, her voice softening with distress. ‘I don’t want to get stuck all the way out here.’

‘Can’t you just call a garage?’ he said, and immediately cursed himself. That would be all they needed, a vehicle-recovery team showing up.

But now the woman spoke again, taking a couple of steps towards him, unzipping the front of her anorak. To his disbelief, he saw that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

‘There must be something I can do,’ she said, ‘to make you change your mind.’

‘Miss, I …’ Barney turned hoarse, his mouth dry of spittle. ‘You can’t be …’

She beckoned him with a long, crimson-tipped finger, before slowly backtracking.

Barney wondered if he was actually unconscious and dreaming. Even though a voice inside kept telling him that this didn’t happen in real life, he followed her anyway – back around the front nearside corner of the van and down along the flank of it towards the deep shadows where her own vehicle was parked.

As Kev made his way back to the van, he quietly fumed.

A small man, of thin, wiry stature, the last item he’d taken – the larger of the two mattresses – had almost overwhelmed him with its size and weight. He’d dropped it several times en-route; it had subsequently smeared mud all over the front of his white shell-suit top.

It was no one’s fault obviously, but Barney was still going to cop it verbally.

A bloke his size ought to have gone straight to the heavier items, rather than leaving them for his mate. And where the fuck was he anyway? They ought to have passed each other again by now. Kev was secretly hoping that, whatever remained in the van – and it couldn’t have been much – Barney would take care of it all himself.

But then he came in sight of the vehicle. And stopped short.

Who the bloody hell had been so inconsiderate as to park up behind them?

Surely to God Barney hadn’t been right and, by a one in a million chance, some lazy-arsed copper had happened to drive past and spot what they were up to?

‘These bastards!’ Kev said under his breath, spittle seething through his clenched teeth.

But then he realised that the other vehicle wasn’t a police car. At least, not a marked one.

He padded forward, wondering why both vehicles appeared to be unmanned. If nothing else, Barney still ought to be hanging around. Unless he too had thought the new arrivals were coppers, and had headed for the hills.

That would be so fucking typical.

The big daft prat never watched the news, of course. Dear Lord, they weren’t even sending burglars down these days. Did Barn seriously expect they’d find prison space for fly-tippers? Of course, even if such stupidity explained why Barney was absent, it offered no clue about the car behind. By the looks of it, it was a relatively new Ford Mondeo. A posh bit of kit to be driving on a rubbish-strewn wasteland like this.

Then, without warning, the van’s headlights came on, catching Kev in their full beam. He backed away a step, raising his hand to block the dazzle.

‘Whoa!’ he shouted. ‘Barney, that you?’

The van’s engine chugged and coughed, and grumbled to life.

With a CLUNK, it was thrown into gear – and then rocketed forward.

‘Jesus!’ Kev screamed.

It crunched headlong into him, its front bumper-bar slamming his thighs with sledge-hammer force, snapping them both like sticks of celery, its windscreen smashing into his face with explosive force.

Kev was carried forward for several yards, spread-eagled, before the driver hit the brakes. The van screeched to a halt in front of the Portakabin, and he slumped to the ground. At the same time, a heavy, cumbersome form catapulted down from on top of the van’s roof, and landed with a thud on the gritty floor next to him.

Kev was only vaguely aware what had happened. His body felt like a heap of disjointed wood. There was no feeling in it, and when he tried to turn his head sideways, his neck burned with a bone-deep fire. Even so, he managed to focus on the prone figure at his side. This too was in a broken, bedraggled state, but its face, which had been worked over with some heavy implement until it was gory pulp, was just about recognisable. As Barney.

This made no sense to Kev.

Barn had been on the roof of the van?

Who put him there?

A pair of feet trudged up behind him. Kev wanted to glance around, but his neck was hurting too badly. With a slow exhalation of breath, someone sank to their knees.

‘Two trophies for the price of one,’ a hoarse voice snickered.

To Kev’s incredulity, his flies were pulled down and someone started unbuttoning his skinny jeans.

‘Did you really think you were going to get some?’ the voice whispered. ‘You little shit! You little rodent! Did you and that brainless hunk of meat seriously believe you were going to tap this perfect arse?’

Kev still didn’t understand. Chill air embraced him as his underpants were ripped away.

These bastards, he thought as he ebbed into unconsciousness.

Chapter 7

The Intel Unit convened that first Monday, in their office on the top floor at Robber’s Row – to find that some wag from somewhere else in the nick had already attached a paper sign to the door, which read:

Ripper Chicks

As a general rule, there was dark humour, and then there was black humour, and then there was police humour. It was a psychological defence mechanism, of course. The best way to fend off the stress of spending every day steeped to your armpits in human misery was by laughing at it. But even by those standards, this was seen by several of the girls as a little close to the knuckle. Some, on the other hand, thought it rather catchy.

‘Kind of rolls off the tongue,’ PC Julie Ebbsworth from Oldham said. ‘We are the Rrrriiipper Chicks!’

‘Well, the blokes have always had cool nicknames, haven’t they,’ DC Val Ashworth from Preston replied. ‘They’ve had the Shots, the Protectors, the Sweeney. Why can’t we be the Ripper Chicks?’

Perhaps if they’d been investigating the ripping apart of female victims, consensus that they weren’t offended by it would not have been achieved so quickly. It might also have been the case that, given what they were all about to undergo – and no doubt this had been preying on several of their minds for the whole of the weekend – this mischievous rebranding of their unit by an outside party did not seem such a big deal.

When agreement was reached, DS Sally Bryant agreed to leave the sign there. In fact, she said she’d take it home with her after shift and have it laminated so that it could be a permanent fixture on their office door.

After this, they got down to business, using the locker room attached to the briefing room to change from the casual attire they’d worn to travel to work, to the street-gear they hoped would help them blend in when they hit the streets.

Lucy had chosen a clingy blue camisole with lacy ribbons down the front rather than buttons, blue satin hot pants, fishnets and blue suede thigh-boots with platform soles. Over the top, she wore a black plastic mac. Her hair hung loose, while her make-up was loud and garish. All the girls affected similar transformations, looking each other over approvingly before deciding they were ready. There were some titters and sniggers, but an air of nervousness prevailed as the realisation finally dawned that they were going out there more or less alone. They’d have their phones and their ‘guardian angels’, as the plain-clothes TSG guys were now being referred to, but none of them would be carrying radios or wires. If they got into a cat-fight, they’d been advised, they’d have to see it through on their own (unless it turned very nasty), because it was always possible that communications devices could be exposed through yanked or torn clothing.

Lucy was only thirty, but she was actually one of the oldest present and certainly the most experienced. Deferring to this, more than a couple of the other girls came over seeking words of comfort or encouragement, neither of which she was able to offer in abundance. Detective Sergeants Bryant and Clark were in a similar boat; technically, they were the girls’ line-managers, but in reality they’d be role-playing themselves and thus unable to act as normal supervision.

Shortly after three, DI Slater appeared, having run through several pointers with the male members of the team in the next room along. He now went through everything again with the girls, and then gave them a quick pep talk.

‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that. Ordinarily, we’d put you through a month’s training for a job like this, but there simply isn’t time. It may interest you to know – and this is totally embargoed, so don’t go blabbing – we’ve got another couple of APs. Both were found this morning on wasteland near Bickershaw.’

There was a dumbfounded silence in the room. If there’d been any doubts in any minds about the necessity of this action-plan, they’d been expunged now.

‘They may be ours, they may not be,’ Slater said, ‘but … well, they probably are. All the signs are there. If so, that makes it six victims and counting. Ladies, this assailant is absolutely relentless and the public is getting wind of it. When this next two hit the headlines, there’ll be a total circus, which’ll mean extra pressure on the investigation team, more stress, more mistakes. We need to pull together and get it sorted. So go out there and do your job, but watch your backs as well, and I mean watch them closely. The more men die at the hands of Jill the Ripper – sorry, I hate using that name but I don’t see what difference objecting to it will make now – the more vulnerable you people are going to be.’

Lucy would find out for herself what Slater meant by this approximately one hour after arriving at her designated pitch, which was a small picnic area – in reality little more than a thinly treed grass verge – just off the stretch of the A580 dual carriageway, better known locally as the East Lancashire Road or ‘East Lancs’, that ran south-west from Boothstown towards Lowton.

Her guardian angel that evening was PC Andy Clegg, a TSG officer in his early twenties. He was a bullish lad, well built around the chest and arms, but whose regulation-cut dark hair, ruddy, chubby features and permanently grave expression only served to underline his youth. Lucy wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged by this or unnerved. When they chatted before setting off, Lucy seeking nothing more than an informal introduction, he responded to her questions in taut monosyllables, which suggested that he was either very focused on the job, which was good, or that he was tongue-tied and abashed in the presence of a female officer who happened to be showing leg and cleavage, which wasn’t so good. There was a time to be embarrassed, and this wasn’t it.

Clegg would be sitting in an unmarked car on wasteland on the other side of the East Lancs – a battered old relic of a Ford Focus, equipped with a pair of night-vision binoculars. Without doubt he’d have the physical ability to help her, and the willingness to get stuck in – young male coppers were nothing if not reckless in their efforts to prove themselves. She just hoped he had the judgement to go with it.

And this was to be tested as soon as they arrived at her pitch.

Lucy was dropped off at the picnic site by an unmarked van with fake company logos on the sides. The hoped-for impression was that she’d just successfully serviced a bunch of navvies. The TSG lads inside the van assisted by beating on its sides and whooping aloud as the vehicle roared away. Following this, she stood out in the open, which wasn’t difficult given the proximity of the streetlights and the semi-leafless state of the autumnal trees, brandished a fistful of twenty-pound notes, and commenced a slow, deliberate count.

It had the desired effect.

Two girls were waiting nearby, only half discernible in the dank shadows. One of them was black, one of them white; both wore leather jackets, short skirts and heels. They sauntered towards her side-by-side.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ the white girl wondered, her accent strong Scouse.

‘Who’s asking?’ Lucy replied, tucking the money up the sleeve of her mac.

The black girl leaned forward menacingly, an impression enhanced by an old scar that diagonally bisected her mouth and was still clearly visible despite a preponderance of emulsion-like lip gloss. ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with you, you gobby bitch!’ she snarled. ‘This is our pitch and you’re fucking trespassing!’

Lucy shrugged, but her spine was already tingling. ‘Don’t see a signpost, love.’

The black girl snapped her hand out, and a gleaming blade sprang into view. ‘I’ll slice your fucking tits off, you cow!’

‘Or alternatively, you can pay up,’ the Scouse girl said.

Lucy gazed from one to the other, affecting dimness. ‘What?’

‘We share everything here. And we know you’re not short of cash given that road crew you’ve just balled … so cough up.’

Even from across the dual carriageway, Lucy heard a thud from the back of the Ford Focus, as if Clegg was already getting set to intervene. That’d be great. She could just picture him clumping across the blacktop in his army surplus trousers, hoodie top and baseball cap. He’d save her of course, but it’d be quite a coincidence – that the moment the new girl was threatened, a tall, dark stranger stepped in.

But by a miracle, perhaps suggesting that he was smarter than she’d thought, he held off.

‘So I have to pay you two for the privilege of standing here?’ Lucy said. ‘On this stretch of public highway which anyone else can use free of charge?’

‘See,’ the Scouse girl said to her mate. ‘Told you she was clever.’

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Lucy said, suspecting they were bluffing but now knowing she had to call that bluff.

‘This look funny to you?’ The black girl offered the blade again.

Though its glinting steel tip was now right under Lucy’s nose, less than an inch from severing her septum, she was determined to remain composed. That was all you could ever do in this job, pretend. It didn’t mean that, deep inside, her heart wasn’t going like the clappers.

‘Go on then,’ Lucy said. ‘Cut me up. I wonder what would make Mr Merryweather angrier? That … or the fact I had to share his hard-earned to buy you two off?’

The two prostitutes didn’t exactly flinch, but the blankness of their expressions said more than words ever could.

‘You don’t work for Nick Merryweather,’ the Scouse girl finally replied.

‘Not directly,’ Lucy agreed, ‘but we know whose pocket you’ll ultimately be picking, don’t we!’

She was onto a winner; she could tell. No one would believe that she had some kind of hotline to the Crew’s whoremaster-in-chief, but the mere fact she knew who he was would indicate that she was no novice, that she wasn’t just playing at this.

‘So go on, cut me!’ she urged them. ‘Or maybe you can put the sodding blade away … and just to show there’s no hard feelings, because yeah, I am trespassing a little bit, I can give you something to be going on with.’ She filched two twenties from under her sleeve, and offered one to each of them. Oddly enough, probably because this kind of thing had never happened before, they were hesitant to take them.

‘I’ve never seen you round here,’ the black girl said, still snarling, but the blade now lower. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘I’m Keira,’ Lucy said.

‘Keira?’ The black girl hooted. ‘Jesus wept, couldn’t you think of anything more fucking original?’

‘Who are you?’ Lucy asked her.

‘I’m not telling you my fucking name.’ The girl pocketed her switchblade, but snatched the twenty and backed away. ‘Just piss off, you silly fucking mare.’

The Scouse lass gave Lucy a long, searching look – as if somehow suspecting this thing still wasn’t right – then helped herself to her own twenty, taking it almost gingerly between thumb and forefinger, before turning on her heel and hurrying to catch up with her mate, the pair of them dwindling off along the leaf-cluttered verge.

Lucy watched them as she slowly calmed herself down, wondering if any kind of bridge had been built there or perhaps if it was quite the opposite.

‘You won’t make friends that way, love,’ a voice said from somewhere to the right, seeming to answer the question for her. ‘They’ll just mark you as a soft touch and try and scam you again.’

Lucy turned to the trees and had to squint through the darkness under their half-naked boughs. The dull yellow glow of the streetlights didn’t penetrate too far. However, her eyes were now attuning, and she realised that a third party was close at hand. Another girl, younger than the others by the looks of her, with longish red hair and a very short dress, was seated on top of a picnic table, high-heeled shoes resting on the bench in front of her, as she swigged from a bottle of vodka.

‘And you’re not part of Necktie Nicky’s stable neither,’ she said, screwing the cap back on and giving a satisfied belch. ‘You wouldn’t dare give that much of his dosh away if you were.’

Lucy ambled towards her. ‘I admit I’ve never met Mr Merryweather personally …’

‘No one has who’s so far down the food-chain that they have to walk these streets, love. Anyway, you can spare me the bullshit …’ The red-headed girl climbed down. ‘I know what you really are.’

Lucy held her tongue, unsure how to respond.

The girl slid the bottle into her shoulder bag, and struggled with the zip of her scruffy fleece jacket before finally drawing it up. She was shapely but short, not much more than five feet tall. There was no threat here, but the last thing Lucy needed was to be outed on her first night. She wondered what it was that might have given the game away.

‘You’re an independent, aren’t you?’ the girl said.

Up close, even in the gloom, Lucy could see that she had a pretty face, though she smelled strongly of alcohol. If Lucy hadn’t been very used to it thanks to all the drunken prisoners she’d wheeled in over the years, it would have been nauseating.

‘And you’re new to the game,’ the girl added. ‘You know how I can tell? Because you haven’t got the thousand-yard stare. I’m Tammy, by the way. And that’s my real name too. I was christened Tamara. Can you fucking believe that?’

It was an odd way to introduce herself; delivered in a casual, only half-interested tone, as if the information barely mattered.

‘Keira,’ Lucy said.

‘Yeah, I heard. So what’s the story, Keira? Lost your job? House repossessed? Kids hungry?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And you thought this’d be a piece of piss?’

‘Not exactly a piece of piss.’

‘Easy money then?’

Lucy shrugged, took the wad of notes from under her sleeve and screwed it up into a ball. ‘You telling me I just got lucky when I met that gang of workmen?’

Tammy eyed the money as it disappeared into Lucy’s bag. ‘Sometimes we get lucky, I suppose.’ She took a step back, this time eyeing Lucy herself. ‘You don’t look the worse for wear considering you’ve just been star-attraction in a backseat gangbang.’

Lucy realised her mistake. She should have smeared her lippy and mussed her hair a little. But it was too late now. She could only brazen it out.

‘How many were there?’ Tammy asked.

‘Three.’

‘Jesus! Talk about getting off to a flyer. Anyway … your minge must be killing you, which means this one’s for me.’

Lucy hadn’t realised it, but another vehicle had drawn up at the verge just behind them: a grey SUV with tinted windows. The front nearside window rolled downward.

There were two guys inside it, one behind the wheel and one in the front passenger seat. This immediately struck Lucy as a potential problem, though if Tammy needed the custom, who was she to object? As the girl teetered across the grassy verge in her ridiculously high heels, the passenger grinned, white teeth splitting his thick black beard. He was somewhere in his early thirties, brawny and wearing a lumberjack-style plaid shirt.

‘You gents looking for a good time?’ Tammy tittered, leaning down at the window.

Plaid Shirt’s expression rapidly changed – from lewd grin to twisted scowl.

‘YOU MURDERING SLAGS!’ he screamed, before throwing something into her face.

Lucy caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark, lumpen object wrapped in what looked like white tissue. The next thing, Tammy’s hoarse voice rang out, an exclamation of horror and disgust, as she tottered backwards. The SUV sped away, howls of mocking laughter echoing from its interior. When Tammy turned to face Lucy, the excrement was smeared down her left cheek and around the side of her mouth. Solid fragments of it spattered her décolletage; a strip of filthy toilet paper had tucked itself into her cleavage.

Quite clearly, the two most recent murders had finally hit the headlines.

‘Dirty bastards!’ Tammy stammered, eyes glimmering with tears of shock.

Lucy hurried over to her. ‘Here, let me help.’

She had some face wipes in her shoulder bag, but Tammy tried to pull away, too embarrassed in front of the new girl to allow herself to be assisted.

‘No,’ Lucy said, refusing to release her arm. ‘Let me help.’

‘Not here, for fuck’s sake!’ Tammy snapped, voice turning nasal as the tears flowed. ‘God, the stink!’

‘I can clean it off,’ Lucy insisted.

‘Yeah, but not out here!’ Tammy yanked her arm loose and strutted quickly away, working her way deeper into the copse of trees, heels clacking as she joined a paved pathway, which snaked from the road into denser shadows. Lucy followed, shoving the wipes back into her bag. Fleetingly, Tammy was invisible in the darkness ahead – it was only possible to follow her by her footfalls and sniffles. By the sounds of it, she’d quickly got on top of the tears. Probably couldn’t afford not to in this line of work. Lucy accelerated and fell into step alongside her. The path weaved away from the picnic area towards what looked like an open, well-lit space, though they passed several more girls before they got there, most of them standing talking quietly, indistinguishable in the darkness, only the tiny red pinpoints of cigarettes and the occasional whiff of cannabis revealing their presence.

Tammy sniffled again and tried to wipe under her eyes, inadvertently smearing her fingertips with excrement. ‘Bastards!’ she hissed. ‘Can’t fucking believe this!’

‘Nor me,’ Lucy agreed.

‘Yeah, but you’re new. I ought to have learned my lesson by now.’

The path ended at the edge of what was actually a lorry park. This was a rectangular dirt lot, rugged and rutted at this time of year, and about thirty acres in size. It was still close to the East Lancs, extending along it in a southerly direction, but was encircled on three sides by trees and undergrowth. At the far side stood a single-storey red-brick building, a combo of service garage and lorry drivers’ cafe.

‘There are some toilets round the back,’ Tammy muttered as they walked over there, passing numerous trucks and wagons, some old and some new, some with curtained interiors.

When they reached the building, they circled round it, away from its glazed, brightly glowing frontage, passing a row of bins and a pile of spare but rusting auto-parts. At the very rear, two doors stood covered with flaking paint. One was marked ‘Gents’, the other ‘Ladies’.

Two more girls were standing here, chatting as they smoked. One of them, a bottle-blonde in a fur coat and a preponderance of mascara, spotted them as they approached. Initially she looked shocked, but then she grinned,

‘And what happened to you, Tammy, love?’

‘What’s it look like?’ Tammy replied sulkily. ‘Some bastard threw a turd at me.’

The bottle-blonde coughed cigarette smoke as she guffawed. ‘Oh my God … sorry, love, but rather you than me!’

The other woman, who was older, grey-haired in fact, and considerably heavier – and thus looked awful in her matching red mini-dress and stilettos – seemed completely unmoved. She simply took in the night air, expelling streams of smoke through her flaring nostrils.

‘They were a lot of help,’ Lucy said when they’d entered the toilets, to which Tammy only grunted.

The Ladies was a small, boxy room with white-tiled walls and a damp concrete floor. There were four cubicles, three of them marked “Out of Order”, and two large mirrors over two side-by-side washbasins. The mirrors were grubby and smeared. Across the top of each one, some past comedian had used a black marker-pen to offer his opinions on the unfortunate women who’d routinely imprint their faces in the glass below in order to fix their make-up. The one on the left read Blowjob Queen of Manchester!, and to ensure there was no misunderstanding, an arrow pointed downward. The one on the right was signposted: Takes it up the arse! Yukkity yuk!

Lucy handed the face wipes over so that Tammy could clean herself, though it was already apparent that the girl was going to need to go home and take a shower. Throw enough shit and some of it will stick, as the old saying went – sometimes, as in Tammy’s case, in your hair as well.

However, if Lucy had anticipated a range of expletives from the young hooker – and here in the stark white light of the drab toilet, she could see just how young she was, clearly not much more than twenty – she was to be disappointed.

Tammy merely sighed to herself as she rubbed and scrubbed at her face, occasionally wrinkling her nostrils, accepting the odd bit of help from Lucy.

‘Digby’ll go spare if I go home without earning tonight,’ she muttered. Again, this was spoken matter-of-factly, without feeling, as if all this awfulness was simply routine.

‘We can probably get most of it off here,’ Lucy said, in attempted consolation.

‘Gimme a break, love. No john’s going to want to give me one now, is he? The first whiff he gets, he’ll chuck his tea up.’ Tammy continued scrubbing on her own. ‘Can’t believe we’re actually getting blamed for these murders now.’

‘Yeah, how about that,’ Lucy said.

‘You picked a good time to start out, I’ll tell you.’

‘That’s what I was thinking.’

‘Don’t worry …’ Tammy actually managed to crack a smile.

In the process of cleaning away the filth, she’d also removed most of her slap, but she was none the worse for that. She had rosebud lips, a snub nose, a dusting of freckles and a pair of fetching green eyes – there was something of the saucy minx about her. Lucy couldn’t help wondering how so pretty a youngster had finished up in this profession.

‘I’ve got just the thing for us,’ Tammy said. ‘Look in my bag.’

Lucy did as instructed, and alongside Tammy’s purse found the vodka bottle. It was still half full.

‘Help yourself,’ Tammy said.

‘Nah …’ Lucy shrugged ‘I’m teetotal.’

‘What the fuck!’ Tammy broke off cleansing herself to gaze at her new pal in disbelief. ‘Aren’t you full of fucking surprises? You’re the hottest thing I’ve seen up here in yonks, you chuck your money round like there’s no tomorrow and now you don’t imbibe!’

‘I used to, but it never did me any good.’

‘Never does me any good either, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like it. Hand it over.’

Lucy obliged, and Tammy took several large swigs, a quarter of the bottle vanishing in one fell swoop. She screwed the cap back on and belched again.

‘Ahhh … nothing better when you’ve had a chocolate log chucked in your face. Anyway –’ she grabbed the handbag and shoved the bottle back inside it ‘– gotta make a move. Nice meeting you. What did you say your name was?’

‘Keira,’ Lucy replied. ‘But my real name’s …’

Tammy held a hand up. ‘Best if I don’t know your real name.’

‘You told me yours.’

‘Yeah, but I’m a fuck-up … as you’ve seen. Bad stuff always happens to me, but it’s usually for a reason. Anyway, thanks again for your help.’ Tammy turned back from the doorway. ‘Listen … if you need someone to show you the ropes, the blonde bimbo outside, Sandy, can be alright. She’s a bit of piss-taker, but her bark’s worse than her bite. Just watch the other one, Tomasina. If she finds out you’ve got that much dosh in your purse, she’ll have the lot. And she’ll kick your face to mush in the process.’

Lucy nodded and smiled in thanks. And then Tammy was gone, the toilet door slamming, the sound of it echoing through the damp cell that appeared to be their one and only indoor refuge on these cold, wet autumn nights. She turned back to the mirror, the sheet of grimy glass with Blowjob Queen of Manchester! scrawled over the top. A foul stench emitted from the sink. When she glanced down, she saw that someone had vomited into it. And now, just to complete the picture, it was also crammed with Tammy’s screwed-up, shit-stained tissues.

Lucy regarded her sallow features in the tarnished glass.

This was going to be a vastly more challenging stake-out than even she’d anticipated.

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