Everyone Lies (32 page)

‘If you had used the GMex car park, I would have expected you to appear from the east, at the corner of Lower Mosley Street.’

‘Did it occur to you that street parking’s free this time of night?’

‘And you looked over your shoulder twice, and I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve checked the entrance in the last ten minutes.’

‘Leave it alone, Nick, okay?’ Her voice was steely, but he saw a lingering shadow of anxiety in her eyes. ‘There’s no sign of Candice,’ she said, firmly. ‘She’s a key witness, and I haven’t got the staff to find her. So now it’s your turn – what have you been up to in these halls of decadence?’

Subject changed, and not subtly, either.
Do what the woman says – leave it alone.

He thought about the two hours before her arrival, working on the aged-up picture of his daughter and what he’d done with it, and he quailed. ‘You want the useful or the stupid?’

She gazed at him thoughtfully, her brown eyes soft and full of warmth in the dimmed lighting of the bar. ‘Better tell me the useful first, in case I get so pissed off about the other thing I forget you’re a brilliant scientist so all I can see is the idiot in you.’

‘That’s probably the most backhanded compliment I’ve ever had.’

She toasted him with her tonic water.

‘Okay. The cross-hatch whip marks give you physical evidence linking Marta and Rika. The toxicology reinforces the link between those two
and
establishes a link to the penicillin deaths.’

She took a breath – they both knew that biochemistry would be far more persuasive to a jury than a visual comparison of injuries. Chemical tests were quantifiable, hard to argue with.

‘Remember right at the start of this, when life was simple and you were just investigating a few drugs deaths over the odds? You sent me samples of drugs found with the bodies. Well, the university lab has been working steadily through those in my absence, and Josh emailed with the results today. One of the tests I asked for was HPLC – High Performance Liquid Chromatography. Think of the tests you did at school with a wee blob of ink on a filter paper—’

‘Skip to the results, Nick.’

He flashed an apologetic grin. ‘The heroin that killed Rika had the same chemical profile as the deals found in the penicillin deaths, and
they
were the same as the heroin found with Marta’s body.’

She stared at him, round-eyed. ‘The same heroin batch links to
all
of the deaths?’

‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘Rika’s deal wasn’t cut with penicillin, and the proportion of penicillin used in the later deals actually increases, so they’re definitely different batches. I’m talking about the
underlying composition
of the different batches.’

She frowned and he explained, ‘You’re decorating a room – you would always buy rolls from the same batch off the production line to guarantee a perfect match, wouldn’t you?’

She nodded. ‘Okay …’

‘This is the same. Over the months, several batches have been made; there are subtle differences, but they all contain methaqualone – a narcotic used to bulk heroin. The key thing is, it’s not
commonly
used, and that makes it distinctive, and it’s present in
exactly
the same ratio in the overdose samples, the penicillin deaths, right through to the bindle found with Marta.’

‘So it must have come from the same place,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘The bulk supplies of heroin would probably be mixed abroad, and that’s where the methaqualone would be added. But it makes sense to do most of the cutting near to the point of final distribution – smaller volumes coming through customs have a better chance of getting the stuff through unnoticed. When it gets to the suppliers, they add in the penicillin.’

She took a thoughtful sip of her drink. ‘Methaqualone – that’s Quaaludes, isn’t it?’

‘Quaaludes, quacks, quales, quas—’ He smacked himself in the forehead with the flat of his hand.

‘What?’

‘You’re right – I
am
an idiot,’ he said. ‘In the seventies, “luding out” was a popular college pastime in the States. Methaqualone – “ludes” – has several effects: it heightens sexual sensitivity, lowers inhibition and the user has
no memory
of the dirty deeds of the night before.’

She stared at him. ‘Just like George Howard.’ Her eyes glowed and he felt an answering flicker of excitement; they had found another possible link to the heroin deals. ‘Would methaqualone show up in the hair analysis?’ she asked.

‘You just have to tell the toxicologist to look for it. But toxicology takes time. And even if you get a positive, it won’t tell you who administered the drug.’

She thought about that. ‘Either way, I think we need to know.’

‘Agreed. But it won’t do you any good in the short term, Kate, and so far as this investigation goes, the short term is all you’ve got.’

She sighed. ‘Yup. We need to identify the supplier. I mean the real supplier – not some street dealer who jumps a red light in front of a patrol car and screams “Catch me!”’

‘The steady increase in penicillin as a cutting agent suggests a disruption of supply—’

She held up her hand. ‘I know what you’re going to say – you need the lab analysis of drugs seized during Operation Snowstorm. I’m sorry – you really should have had that by now. I’ve asked Superintendent Tanford to email me a copy of his report. Speaking of Tanford …’ She picked up her phone and opened her messaging program.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Texting Superintendent Tanford.’

‘Kate, it’s a quarter to midnight.’

She checked her watch, cancelled the text, opened her email and began again: ‘I’m
emailing
Tanford so he can pick it up in the morning. Field Intelligence said there’s no significant drugs intel on the Henry brothers, or George Howard. But like Tanford said, his squad is better placed for that kind of ear-to-the-ground rumour.’

She sent the email and looked up at him. ‘Everyone’s lying, Nick – even the people I’m trying to help.’

She looked about done in, and he realized she must have been working flat out for forty-eight hours. He handed her his Scotch and picked up her glass of tonic. ‘Churchill said, “There are a lot of lies going around … and some of them are true.”’

‘Profound,’ she said. ‘Churchillian.’

He sipped her tonic water, trying not to shudder.

‘The truth will reveal itself when you have more facts. Go home, get some sleep, let the computers and analysts and information gatherers do their work.’

She tasted his whisky, approved his choice. ‘So,’ she said. ‘What was the stupid thing you did?’

That surprised a laugh from him. ‘And you say
I
have a mind like a steel trap.’

‘Like I’m going to forget you admitting to any kind of weakness,’ she said, smiling.

He saw that smile and wanted to hold on to it, which is why he didn’t tell her that after working through the lab results he had in fact spent too long staring at the pictures of Rika. The photograph they had found in Marta’s purse pictured a pretty, smiling girl with a tumble of brown curls and dark, defiant eyes. Her estimated age at time of death was eighteen. In the post-mortem picture, one eye was closed, the other half open, and the cornea, desiccated in the hours after death, had a bluish cast. He had set the two images side by side – Rika full of life and hope/Rika dead. He couldn’t make them match. Suzie – his Suzie – was only a few years younger than Rika.

Before he could reason with himself – before he could argue himself out of it – he had created a Facebook page and launched the image which for two years he’d tinkered with offline. Suzie aged ten; Suzie aged fifteen. Her name; a bio – five years too short – a picture of him, so that if she came looking she would know that he loved her and had never given up on her.

32

‘It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.’

C
OLETTE

Suzie and Becky are zooming up the street on skate-boards, whooping with glee. Suzie scoots up the Simms’s driveway, and then down at speed, her face tight with concentration. She veers off to the left, heading for the kerb, tips the leading edge of her board and lands perfectly, a grin of exultation on her face.

Fennimore knows he is dreaming. He has arrived at Kate Simms’s house to pick up his daughter. When she sees him, Suzie flips her board into her hand and tucks it under her arm. It doesn’t belong to her – it’s Becky’s, and she knows she shouldn’t have it, but she stands tall and eyes him defiantly. She is ten years old.

Becky tries to slide the board from under her arm, as though he’ll forget what he’s just seen if Suzie just hands over the incriminating evidence. But Suzie resists, glaring at her friend, and Becky, always the follower in their friendship, gives up and hugs her own board across her narrow chest.

‘Suzie,’ Fennimore says, ‘you promised your mother—’

‘I
didn’t
.’ Her eyebrows draw down into a scowl. Becky stands very still to one side, her eyes wide with shock that Suzie should speak so boldly to her father.

It’s true, she hadn’t promised. What she’d said was, ‘Fine – but you won’t stop me. I’ll borrow one. Or steal one.’ Suzie’s relationship with her mother has never been easy.

She has a healing scar on her left temple – a fall, practising ‘acid drops’ from the kerb on her skateboard. The cut bled profusely and Rachel had rushed from the house hearing the girls’ terrified screams. It was fear that made her confiscate the board, and stubbornness that made her refuse to relent. And true to her word, Suzie had persuaded Becky to loan her an old board.

Becky is tugging at his hand. ‘Uncle Fenn.’ He was always Uncle Fenn to Becky. ‘Uncle Fenn, Mummy wants you.’

He groans in his sleep and tries to shake her off. This is a good dream; he wants to stay a while.

A fire alarm goes off further down the road and the girls stare at him, as though wondering what he’s going to do about it. They’re fading. The dream-ringing follows him into reality, and he realizes that his mobile is jangling on the bedside table.

‘You do sleep sometimes, then?’

Kate Simms.

Half drugged with sleep, he wonders how Becky knew it was her mother on the line, then something clicks in his head and he’s fully awake. He sits up, yawns, asks, ‘What time is it?’

‘Four a.m. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?’

‘Sure.’

‘Good, I’m on my way.’

‘What’s up?’

‘Liz Dromer just rang.’ This was Kate’s community partnership contact. ‘She’s found the surviving victim of the abduction-torture up in Hull – the eighteen-year-old who was in the injuries database – Tanya Repton. She’ll talk to me, but she won’t give a formal statement, she won’t go anywhere near a police station, and she insists that Liz is present.’

By 4.25 they were heading east on the M62 in Simms’s Mondeo towards Goole. It was a ninety-minute drive and Fennimore had insisted on taking the wheel, despite Simms’s protests that she’d had a good three hours of sleep.

‘And before that?’ he’d asked.

She’d shrugged. ‘I’m good at power-napping.’

‘That’s what worries me,’ he’d said, plucking the keys from her hand.

They drove full into an easterly wind that blasted tiny snow crystals into the windscreen like a cold white dust storm. For a time, he hugged close in behind a gritting lorry until the road began the steady descent towards the flatlands of the East Riding of Yorkshire. Kate slept through it, but as Fennimore slowed for the off-ramp, she stirred and woke.

‘Take it slow.’ Her words were slurred with sleep. ‘It’s a few hundred yards down on the left.’

He saw the lights first, shining down on the car park in pods of three, like alien landing craft. Then he saw the big, plastic gold M and groaned. ‘McDonald’s,’ he said. ‘Oh, joy.’

‘Tanya works here.’ She squinted at the dashboard clock. ‘And she’s just about to knock off.’

Stepping out of the car, the air felt cold enough to turn to ice crystals in his lungs, but at least it had stopped snowing. The buzz of traffic on the M62 a few hundred yards away was a constant in the background. The car park was almost deserted, but the door of an old Peugeot estate opened and a woman stepped out.

Liz Dromer was nearing sixty, grey-haired, with direct blue eyes. She hugged Simms.

‘How did you find her so fast?’ Simms asked.

Liz smiled. ‘I knew who you wanted as soon as you said the name,’ she said. ‘Tanya went through our rehab programme. But I had to square it with her, first.’

Liz turned to shake Fennimore’s hand. ‘Professor – I know you by reputation.’ She gripped his hand a second or two longer than was necessary, and stared into his eyes. Hers was a face that had lived through pain and learned to endure.

If not for the flaw in Tanya Repton’s iris, Fennimore wouldn’t have recognized her. The slate-grey irises had lost their sullen hopelessness and shone with good health. She had grown her hair out to her natural brown and when she took off her staff cap it fell, silky and shining, to her shoulders.

Carrying a tray of coffees, she guided them to a table in the far corner. Tanya was eighteen years old when she’d been abducted; she would be around twenty now, but her oval, pixyish face and shy manner made her seem much younger. Her skin was clear and flawless, but prone to delicate pink flushes. She avoided looking at Fennimore, even angled her chair and turned her head so that he could see only the side of her face.

‘Back then, I was pretty wrecked,’ she said with a glance at Kate. ‘It was October; wet and cold.’ She stared at the table as she spoke, her voice no more than a whisper.

‘I was on Myton Street, trying to …’ She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. ‘Well, to earn enough for any kind of shit I could find really.’ She didn’t sound bitter. It was as if she was talking about another girl, a distant friend, perhaps – one she pitied, but had little in common with. ‘Most of the girls had given up and gone home for the night. This guy called me over to his car. Said he’d pay me and give me some good grade H if I’d do something extra for him. A game, he called it.’