High-Wired (21 page)

More nervous than she cared to show, she popped into the Ladies’ on her way and ran a comb briefly through her hair, then renewed her lipstick, pulling down her blouse and skirt to disguise any wrinkles, before reluctantly climbing the final flight of stairs to the superintendent’s lair. She knocked the door somewhat uncertainly, and jumped when the summons to enter came.

‘Good morning, sir,’ she greeted him, her face a blank.

‘Good morning, Inspector. Please take a seat,’ came the reply. Devenish was rather like a shark. His face showed little expression until he pounced, whereupon it became as animated as a cartoon character’s. He then returned to impassive again once he had finished chewing his victim into easily swallowed pieces.

‘I have summoned you here,’ he began, ‘to ask you about your team’s progress on the unfortunate run of violent murders from which the town has recently suffered. Please give me your verbal report, DI Hardy.’

Hardy cleared her throat, which suddenly felt like sandpaper. ‘We have forensic evidence due from the boatyard, sir, which will, I believe, link all four of the men suspected of the murders to the killings. These, we believe, took place at said boatyard, and should produce bloodstains, even if these traces are very small.

‘We also have reason to believe that the man who was seriously injured in a car accident on the day before the first victim was found is tied in with the murders, all of which are drug-related. I, personally, shall be visiting him in hospital again to see what further information I can get out of him.

‘Of the four men we suspected of carrying out the killings, one has been reported found dead, apparently fishing at the end of the pier, but I’ve got a hunch that that was a planned assassination rather than a pure and simple murder. It has all the signs of a professional job, from what I’ve heard and could be seen as a punishment from higher echelons for doing a shoddy job, in that we’re on to them, sir.’

‘Good work,’ said Devenish, with a glint of steel in his gaze, before continuing. ‘I’d be grateful if you’d get all the evidence and reports to my office by the end of the day, and stand down from the investigation.’

Olivia was poleaxed by this request.

‘But … why on earth would you want us to do that? We’re pretty close to cracking it.’

‘Because you are treading on the toes of another investigation much more important than this one, and it takes priority. There are members of another team who are undercover, and have been for some considerable time now, and we need
not
to blow their cover, and to leave them a clear field to wrap up this case.’

‘But that’s not fair!’

‘Fair or not, DI Hardy, I have my orders, too, and I have to comply. Don’t think that these men will be unpunished, for they will be brought to justice, but simply not by us.’

‘By whom, then? Sir?’

‘Inspector, this is on a need-to-know basis, and you, simply, do not need to know. You’ll just have to have faith in my judgement and that of my seniors.’

‘But you just can’t switch me off like that. It’s not fair to me, and it’s not fair to my team.’

‘I can and I have. Consider this case closed as far as you are concerned. Now, I don’t want you to go near it anymore. Disobedience will result in disciplinary action for you and for anyone else who assists you. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Hardy sullenly.

‘Before you go,’ he added, as she was already halfway out of her seat, ‘I have been apprised of your personal circumstances, and consider it my duty to order you to take three days’ compassionate leave. You can’t think straight with such a situation preying on your mind, and I like my officers to be one hundred per cent focused on the job in hand.’

‘But I don’t need any leave. Work helps to take my mind off …’

‘Hardy, that, too is an order. Get your things and go home. I don’t want to see you hereabouts for at least three days. You are dismissed. And, by the way, you can release those men you’re holding.’

Hardy left the superintendent’s office, her lips clamped shut to avoid saying anything she might regret, and feeling that there should be smoke and flames issuing from her nostrils. She couldn’t remember ever being this angry before. And just as they were getting somewhere.

When she got back to her office, her face was like a thundercloud, promising nobody any good. She announced loudly that there would be no ID parade for now, as the super had pulled the team off the case and passed it to higher echelons, and thanked them for all the hours they had put in. She then took time to explain to her sergeant exactly what had just happened in more detail. Groves was as appalled as the inspector was at the injustice of the situation, but managed to persuade Olivia that her time would be better spent looking for Hibbie.

‘I’ll push from this end, and you can spend some time phoning round her friends and asking her colleagues at the office whether she said anything to them about her plans to disappear.’

Hal had volunteered to go over to the office where their daughter had worked, taking Ben with him. If Hal couldn’t ferret anything out, maybe the seductive charms of Ben could triumph where he had failed, and Olivia had to be content with that for now.

Olivia checked on the way out of the station whether there had been any progress or sightings of her daughter, but the answer was in the negative, so there was nothing to get her hopes up about.

Olivia had managed to speak to the friend that Hibbie was purported to be staying with, but she had to wait until she got back from school. The girl said that Hibbie had stayed with her for a couple of days, but that was only so that she and her boyfriend could make plans.

‘His name’s Michael, and he’s about ten years older than Hibbie,’ the friend told her.

‘And what does he do?’ asked Olivia, hopeful that this may give them a sniff of a trail to follow, by contacting his place of work.

‘He doesn’t do anything. He’s unemployed and living on benefits.’ This was bad news.

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘Not really. He just drifts around sofa-surfing. As far as I know, he doesn’t have a place of his own. Hibbie said they were going to disappear in London.’ This just got worse.

‘When did you last speak to her?’ This was her last hope.

‘Last night. She said they had been dossing on somebody’s floor until they got together the deposit for a place of their own.’

‘So, they’ve got no money?’

‘Michael was always broke, and Hibbie used to sub him until he got his benefits.’

Olivia ended the call in tears. Things couldn’t be worse. Hibbie had planned the whole thing just to be with this boyfriend, one who couldn’t have sounded more unsuitable: he was basically homeless, living on benefits and Hibbie’s hand-outs, and had persuaded her to run off to London – at least, she assumed it was his idea. Already she didn’t like the sound of him, and although Hibbie had mentioned his name she had not placed any significance on it. She had picked up no clues. Or had she just not heard what her daughter was telling her?

When Hal and Ben got home, they had no more information than she had, but Ben had got a date with the girl in the office who was closest to his sister. ‘You never know, Ma, I could turn out to be the new Sherlock Holmes,’ he joked, but soon wiped the smile off his face when his mother burst into tears again.

‘I feel as if the heart has been ripped out of me. How could a child of mine do this to me – to us? When have we ever seriously stopped her from doing anything she wanted? The closest we came to being strict was when we put time restrictions on when she came in at night, but we let her stay over with friends whenever she wanted. I thought she was happy, getting her own way about leaving school and going to work. Obviously I was wrong, and now she’s punishing us for something we don’t even know we did.’

Hal tried to comfort her, while Ben did his best to produce a scratch supper using only the microwave and the frying pan, but it wasn’t until Olivia had drunk two or three glasses of wine that she managed to stop weeping.

Ben disappeared up to his room to do some mixing, using his headphones so as not to cause a disturbance, and Hal sat with his arm around his wife, trying to change the subject. ‘I didn’t get the chance to tell you, but there was a bit of an uneasy atmosphere at the club last night.

‘I don’t know who rattled their cage, but the manager and his assistant were really jumpy, forever disappearing to make phone calls and going outside for a smoke. I thought they’d both given up, but they were both back on the fags last night. For all I know, it might even have been weed.’

But Olivia didn’t even have the enthusiasm to pretend to be interested. ‘Hal, what does it matter to me what’s going on there now I’ve been dragged off the case? Even if I could tie that place into what I’ve been working on, nobody would take any notice of me because I’ve been shut down. Canned. Retired from it.’

‘I’m sorry, Liv, I just didn’t think.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Olivia didn’t wake until midday, having drowned her sorrows in a lake of wine then swallowed down a couple of sleeping tablets. When she did wake up, her mouth was so dry it could have been made of wood, and her head ached abominably as her stomach roiled in protest at the amount of acid that had formed in it.

She managed to stagger into the bathroom and swallow two glasses of water, before putting two large tablets into a third glass. While they fizzed, she got out a couple of painkillers and washed them down with the still effervescent liquid. Then she looked in the mirror and reared back from what she saw. Her hair made her look like a bag lady, and her face seemed to have aged ten years overnight. Her decision to get straight into the shower was a reaction to what Hibbie would think of her if she were to come home today. She needed to look at least human for whenever her daughter came back. She simply couldn’t allow herself to go to pieces physically.

When she got downstairs, Hal was in the kitchen cooking some brunch. He told her Ben had gone out really early to check out some of his contacts in the bigger town where Hibbie had worked. He said he’d phone in at regular intervals to let them know if he’d made any progress, but Olivia was like a cat on a hot tin roof. ‘I can’t believe the stupid girl said she’d go to London. It’s an evil place, she could get sucked into drugs, or prostitution just to get together enough money for food. She could get herself killed, Hal, or worse.’

‘What could be worse than being killed?’ asked Hal.

‘Getting hooked on drugs, sucked into prostitution, and getting a regular beating from her pimp. Is that bad enough?’

‘God, you really know how to look on the bright side, don’t you? What if she gets fed up with living on somebody’s sofa or floor, cheesed off with no money and not enough to eat, and all the things she’s had done for her like cooking, cleaning, and laundry are suddenly her responsibility. You really don’t suppose she’d just turn up here voluntarily, or at least phone and ask for help,’ he suggested.

‘And what if she’s got no money to top up her phone with? She’s only got a pay-as-you-go because we didn’t want her running up big bills like her friends were.’

‘Liv!’ Hal shouted. ‘You sound like Chicken-Licken when he said the sky had fallen on his head. We can’t live on what ifs.
What if
she just decides to get in touch with us and ask us to come and get her? You know our Hibbie; she doesn’t like roughing it. She even refused to go camping when the rest of us wanted to go because she couldn’t use a proper shower or her hairdryer.’

‘I’m sorry, Hal. I guess I’ve just got an over-active imagination. It goes with the job.’

In the police station, an elderly lady who had come in to speak to somebody of senior rank was passed on to DS Groves. She was in a state of heightened emotion, and gave her name as Elsie Trussler.

Lauren showed her into an interview room and asked her what the matter was. ‘It’s my boy. Your lot came round yesterday and told me he was dead – shot. Now, I know he wasn’t a saint, but he didn’t deserve that, I’m sure. But he’s been mixing with some rather unsavoury characters, and I warned him, no good would come of it; and now he’s dead.’

‘And you want us to find out who did it?’ asked the sergeant.

‘Oh, I know who’s responsible for it, even if he didn’t pull the trigger.’ The woman’s face was grim.

‘You do? Who?’

‘A man called Julian Church. He runs that big club on the seafront – The Shoreline – but my Dennis started doing odd jobs for him, and he got me my job as a cleaner there. Anyway, my Dennis got into some serious stuff with some other men, and he wouldn’t tell me anything about it, just that the money was good.

‘I’m no fool, and I can put times and places together. I know him and those three goons he hung around with were mixed up in them killings that have been taking place. Of course, I wouldn’t have said anything, only there was this knock on the door, and suddenly my Dennis was dead.

‘Well, that man from the club, he phoned me yesterday morning and told me to come in and give his office a right good polishing, which was odd as I didn’t normally clean his office, but before I could get round there, I had a visit from your lot.

‘As I said, I’m not stupid, and it sounded to me that he wanted me to go and polish away any stray fingerprints. He’d probably given the place a going over himself, but he sounded rattled, and I guess that if he was the belt, I was the braces, and he was going to make a run for it with no evidence left behind to identify him, because of my little can of polish and my trusty duster. It’s easy enough to change your appearance, but I do know fingerprints are impossible to alter. They’re what are referred to as “irrefutable evidence”, ain’t they, ducky?’

Lauren couldn’t agree more, and took down Mrs Trussler’s statement herself, then contacted Devenish’s secretary to see if the superintendent had a minute to spare for her, because she’d got some evidence that she thought ought to go straight to him. She was quaking when she finally mounted the stairs, because she had had little to do with the man, but was more than conscious of his reputation of ripping junior officers to ribbons.