Everyone Lies (23 page)

‘No, Boss.’ He frowned at his notebook as if furious with it for letting him down.

Simms didn’t want to crush him – or make the rest of the team afraid to speak up – so she said, ‘Okay. So, no word on the street. Who else did you speak to?’

His eyebrows twitched, like he didn’t understand the question. ‘There is no one else – we haven’t even got a full name for her, Boss.’

A fresh wave of frustration shimmered through her, but she curbed the impulse for sarcasm and said, ‘Did you speak to the coroner? Did you call the SIO who dealt with her case? Has anyone been asking after her? Has her family been in touch?’

‘Uh …’

‘Burial records,’ she said. ‘Where’s she buried? Who paid burial expenses – a friend, a relative, or the state?’

Sweating, he flipped back through the pages as if the facts he hadn’t bothered to establish might magically appear.

‘Details,’ she said again. She looked around the room. ‘I expect every one of you to use your initiative. I expect clear, precise summaries of the work you’ve done, and I do not expect you to prejudge a task too dull to do it well.’ She paused, nodded to let them know that the lecture was over. ‘Okay, who’s dealing with the CCTV?’

Three younger officers raised their hands. Simms had widened the search area, calling in camera records from the streets further from the restaurant and the dump site; these three had spent the day running backwards and forwards through hours of video recordings. They were red-eyed and queasy-looking, as if they’d just stepped off a rollercoaster. One look at their hunched shoulders told Simms they had nothing.

‘You’re doing a good job,’ she said. ‘Important work, so keep at it – we need to trace her dinner partner, and if we can get a better image of the BMW approaching Livebait, or anything near the dump site, it could give us the break we need.’

They nodded, tired, but their heads came up and they looked less defeated.

‘How’re we doing on the mobile phone?’

Renwick scrabbled for a flimsy in the mess of papers on his desk. ‘DNA’s a match to the vic.’

‘The DNA,’ she said, unable to quell her impatience. ‘Is that it? They
still
haven’t come up with the IMEI number?’

‘They say they’d rushed the DNA through, like they’d done us a big favour – you know how it is since forensics went commercial.’

Since the Forensic Science Service went bust, lab work had become a free-for-all, with firms undercutting each other, vying for nice, cost-effective automated jobs where they could press a button and let a machine do the rest. Recovering a number off a scratched and waterdamaged scrap of laminate was manual, labour-intensive, skilled work – which made it a less attractive commercial prospect.

‘The IMEI gives us access to her service provider,’ she said. ‘If the victim called the BMW driver – and she probably did – we’d have him, and a hell of a lot more besides.’

‘I told them all that,’ Renwick said. ‘I said they’d better pull their finger out – we’re not paying them to do half the job. I
told
them – we need that number, and I’ll stay on their case till we’ve got it.’

It sounded like bluster, and Simms wondered if he’d taken the same feeble tone with the lab, but humiliating her office manager in front of the team wouldn’t help, so she said, ‘First thing tomorrow, call them and put a rocket under them.’

He nodded, eager to please.

‘What about Howard’s drinking buddies – has anything turned up there?’

‘Mouse.’ Renwick glanced over his shoulder to Ella Moran, evidently relieved to be able to direct attention away from him. ‘D’you want to tell the boss what you got?’

All eyes turned to Detective Constable Moran. Two experienced male officers had already been taken to task, and as one of only three women in the room – including Simms – Moran must be acutely aware that she had to make this good.

‘I talked to the landlord at half ten this a.m.,’ she said, her voice firm and clear. ‘He said he had nothing more to add. So I went in again at 1 p.m., spoke to some of the lunchtime regulars, but nobody recognized Howard’s picture or the descriptions of the men he was with. I tried again, five until seven – no joy. I’ll drop in on my way home, see if I have any luck with the night-time drinkers.’

Simms looked around the room. ‘Detail,’ she said. ‘Initiative.’ Having made the point, she said, ‘Okay, my turn. Preliminary forensic reports from Howard’s premises haven’t shown up any trace of the victim, so far.’

Renwick shrugged. ‘All that means is he took her elsewhere.’

‘Possibly,’ Simms said, pleased he wasn’t afraid to challenge her, despite the verbal pummelling he’d just had. ‘But Land Registry only has him listed for the one property. So we need to know if he registered anything under a business or trust name – maybe even in the name of a friend or relative. We’re looking for a house, a flat, a storage facility. He’s a man who likes his cars – does he work on them himself? Maybe he has a garage or lockup – if he has, he’s hiding it. Could be he’s renting. So we look closely at phone records, bank and credit card statements – if he took her somewhere else, I want to know where.’

Sergeant Renwick looked over at the HOLMES2 manager. He pointed to his own chest, then to the manager – they would work on task allocation together.

Good.
‘Anything from the massage parlours?’ Simms asked.

Kilfoyle, the constable leading the canvassing team, was young and soft-featured. He dipped his head apologetically. ‘No, Boss. The description we’ve got’s a bit generic – there’s just so many twenty-something blondes out there, and a lot of them are Eastern European.’

Renwick scratched the stubble under his chin, embarrassed. ‘It’s like I said, Boss.’

Simms knew it – when she worked in the Met, only about a quarter of sex workers were actually from the UK.

‘Any owners whose feathers seem particularly ruffled?’ Simms asked. ‘Any of the girls who seemed more nervous than you’d expect?’

‘Um …’ Kilfoyle looked uneasily to his team; she could see he was expecting a bollocking.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Keep handing out those business cards. Make sure they have the Crimestoppers number. Keep pushing. I’ll see if I can squeeze some extra money from the budget to get you out there during the night – catch the late shift.’

That perked them up. Overtime was a word everybody liked to hear.

She looked around the room. ‘But for every good thing, there is a price to pay,’ she said, allowing herself a smile. ‘Who has outstanding reports still to be logged on the system?’ In the exchange of glances she could almost hear them say,
Uh-oh …
She waited for a show of hands. ‘I want them written up and handed in
before
you head for home – clear?’

Detective Superindent Spry had asked for an update before she went home for the night, and Kate Simms headed south-east from Collyhurst Station to the shiny glass and stone offices of the new Greater Manchester Police Headquarters. A trip out to the old HQ, a short step from Man United football stadium, would have meant a slog to the other side of the city, but the new offices were only a short hop from where she was stationed and she made the journey in under five minutes. It glowed blue, standing out against the more modest business offices around it, an entire block of glass and steel.

Spry had a double-size room on the edge of an open-plan office on the third floor. She knocked at his door and heard him clear his throat noisily before calling her in. He didn’t look up from the pile of papers on his desk.

‘I understand you missed this morning’s briefing,’ he said. ‘Being late for morning prayers sets a bad example, Kate.’

Great
, she thought.
There’s a snitch on my crew.
When she didn’t answer, he raised his eyes to meet hers. They were heavy with sleep, and she wondered if she had interrupted a little snooze.

‘I put the time back a little, sir, that’s all,’ she explained.

‘Kate.’ Spry’s broad face was concerned, avuncular. ‘A good start is essential for the team. You can’t keep changing times of briefings, disrupting the day’s tasks.’

She stopped him before he made a prat of himself by getting onto the touchy subject of childcare. ‘I was consulting on the evidence.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘NPIA advisor being helpful, is he?’

The local National Police Improvement Agency advisor would be the person to go to for advice on forensic matters – if she didn’t have Fennimore to turn to. But she did, and since she hadn’t spoken to the NPIA advisor since he’d advised her to shelve the drugs deaths as sad-but-inevitable, Simms diverted Spry’s attention away from the actual question by telling him how far they’d got with the collection of forensic evidence and performance of tests, stopping short of admitting that she had her own private consultant advising her, and one which the ACC would certainly not approve of.

Detective Superintendent Spry listened to the list of tests completed and requests made, the canvassing of saunas and checks on CCTV footage. ‘Isn’t this overkill? You have your suspect.’

‘I have
a
suspect, but I’m not convinced he’s our man.’

Spry looked mildly horrified. ‘Howard’s DNA is on her, her DNA is on him. Stop faffing about and charge him.’

‘His DNA is
on
her, but not
in
her, sir.’

‘So, he wore a condom.’

‘Maybe. If he did, the perineal swabs will still find evidence of him.’

‘And if the evidence is there, will that convince you of his guilt?’ he asked.

She hesitated.

‘For God’s sake, Kate.’

‘There’s no evidence of her on his premises, and nothing in his cars, sir,’ she said.

‘He was careful, cleaned up afterwards.’

‘Nobody cleans up that well. Howard is still refusing to name the men he was drinking with, we still haven’t found the man the victim was with at the restaurant. If the killer intended to make it look like she was an addict, he botched it – and George Howard is too careful for that.’

‘Who knows how a man will act in that situation – he’d just killed a woman!’

‘The lab says the victim’s blood on his shoes wasn’t caused by spatter, it was smeared.’

‘So he rubbed his shoes over. You said yourself, Kate – nobody can clean up every spot of forensic evidence.’

‘If the smearing was caused by an attempt to clean up, you would still expect to see some spatter, but there was none
at all
, sir. This was all transfer – it could be someone used a bloody item of clothing to put it there.’

‘All I’ve heard so far is “could be”, and “maybe”,’ Spry said.

‘There are too many things that don’t add up.’

He stared at her as though she was completely incomprehensible to him. ‘You’re running a criminal investigation, not completing
The Times
crossword, Kate. There are bound to be unanswered questions.’

She opened her mouth to answer, but he raised a finger in warning.

‘I pulled strings to get you this investigation. I put the district SIO’s nose out of joint, prising the case out of his grabby little hands to give it to you. If you make a mess of it …’

It was a threat and a warning, and an expression of anxiety – if she messed up, it would reflect badly on him. She looked into his broad red face, frustrated. The risk of personal embarrassment overrode any concerns he had about justice. Well, Simms wasn’t above playing on his professional vanity.

‘I appreciate your support, sir,’ she said, trying to sound sincere. ‘I know how much is riding on this. And I really don’t want to foul up. Which is why I’m being ultra-careful. George Howard is seriously wealthy – he can afford the best defence – and we’ve got gaps in our evidence, a whacking great hole in the timeline. We don’t even know who the victim is, yet – his lawyers will tear us
apart
.’

‘And the press would love a chance to give us a kicking,’ Spry added, pressing her argument home for her.

She smiled. ‘Well, we don’t have to help them lace up their boots, do we, sir?’

24

Simms’s meeting with Nick Fennimore meant another trip back into the city. Parking for the Midland Hotel was in the NCP car park at the rear of the building, below what used to be Manchester Central railway station and was now an exhibition centre. The car park sprawled over an acre underground. At this late hour the parking bays lay mostly empty, and Simms found a free spot a hundred yards in, on the main level.

There were steps to ground level on Albion Street, where she wanted to be, but the car park was laid out in a grid, and underground, in the dark, it was hard to get her bearings. She stood by her car and turned threesixty. A car pulled into a bay thirty feet from her own; its brake lights flashed once, then the engine fell silent. The late-night hum of traffic washed around her like fog, and she started off down the main inlet, hoping to pick up a sign so that she could get her bearings. Halfway down the row, she saw it: Peter Street and the Midland Hotel. The arrow pointed back the way she’d come – she was heading the wrong way.

Cursing softly, she turned – saw a movement off to her left. The driver of the car that had followed her in, maybe. But she couldn’t see him. She stood still and listened, heard the gritty slither of shoe leather on cobbles. She peered into the shadows. Saw the movement again; closer this time – a hooded figure. He ducked back behind one of the archway pillars. She looked in the opposite direction, back along the bays. A second figure seemed to be lurking near the stairs to the street.

The hooded figure had disappeared. Go forward, or back? Every archway was a hiding place. A place for someone to lurk and pounce. Going back the way she’d come would take her to the quieter end of the street – further from help, if she needed it, and towards the waiting figure and the foot of the steps. Forward would take her nearer the Midland, and safety. Forward, then. She took a few steps, saw a movement deeper into the shadows.

Her heart thudding, keeping her eyes fixed on the spot where she’d seen the movement, her ears straining for the slightest sound, she reached for the Casco baton in her shoulder bag. The weapon weighed just a pound, but it was made from hardened aircraft alloy steel; used deftly, a seven-stone woman could bring down a rugby prop forward with a couple of well-aimed strikes. She headed north, towards Peter Street, keeping to the centre of the bay, hearing sly footsteps in the echoes of her own. A car revved somewhere behind her and she heard a distant squeal of tyres. Ahead she saw a sign for the stairs and she cut right fast, taking the steps two at a time, waiting at street level for whoever was following.