‘Genene Wrax …’
That
name was definitely familiar. Heck placed it: on a mis-per file – one sent down to Scotland Yard at his request by the West Yorkshire Police. It had featured a colour snapshot of a beautiful black girl posed in a graduate ceremony gown, holding a law degree.
‘Went to Leeds Uni?’ he ventured.
She nodded; her eyes were now brimming with tears.
‘There seems to be a resemblance,’ he said.
‘Genene’s my older sister.’ She wiped irritably at her cheeks.
‘Alright, I understand. Lauren … drop the blade, okay? Right now.’
She swallowed, finally closing the knife up and pocketing it, but making sure to keep a distance of several feet between them.
Heck made no further effort to approach. ‘You’re telling me that all this is because you’re trying to find your sister?’
‘I was only shadowing you. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.’
‘Until now. Now you’re hampering a police investigation.’
‘I thought the investigation was closed.’
‘So why were you shadowing me?’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t know what else to do.’
Heck mopped sweaty hair from his brow. ‘If I remember rightly, Genene disappeared three years ago. Why’s it taken you this long to get excited about it?’
‘I’ve been away.’
‘Away?’
‘Afghanistan. Before that it was Iraq.’
‘You’re a soldier?’
‘Was. Until recently. Royal Ordnance Corps, Combat Support Division.’
‘That explains a lot.’ Heck’s side was hurting where she’d thrown him.
‘Look, I’m sorry this has happened,’ she blurted. ‘I’ve been trying to get information through normal channels, but no one seems to know anything. Or they don’t want to talk about it. You any idea how difficult it is for a member of the public to even speak to a copper these days? The small parts of police stations you’re actually allowed into are operated by civvy nobodies who think that, just because they’ve got uniforms on, they can lord it over you.’
Heck dusted himself down before turning back towards his car.
She cautiously followed. ‘It took me ages just to get your name.’
‘Yeah, well I’m sorry, but like I said last night, you wasted your time.’
‘Why? Is the investigation on, or isn’t it?’ She ran to catch up, snatching him by the arm. ‘
I’m talking to you!
’
Heck spun around. ‘
Hey!
Now you’ve stalked me all the way from London so you can threaten me with a knife. You carry on like this … ex-army or not, I’ll throw your arse in jail.’
Her dark cheeks had coloured, her eyes shone. She wasn’t crying now, he noticed. And she didn’t release him.
‘You’re not just going to walk away from me!’ she hissed. ‘Look, my sister’s been missing thirty months and now it’s not a case that you can’t tell me anything … now it’s a case that you
won’t
? Are you having a laugh?’
Heck yanked his arm free. ‘I’m not answerable to you. I’m sorry about what’s happened to your family, but I’m not going to divulge sensitive information to you or anyone else. To start with, I don’t have the first clue who you really are. For all I know, you could be the bloody kidnapper.’
‘You bastard!’ she shouted, as he walked on.
‘If you’ve got a complaint, take it to New Scotland Yard.’
‘If you’re not going to find her, I am …’
He reached his Fiat and opened it. ‘I’d be more concerned about how you’re going to get home, if I were you. That van looks like a write-off.’
‘What … you think I can’t make it out of here on foot? I used to deploy on ten-day patrols, for Christ’s sake … through the most godforsaken mountains you’ve ever seen.’
‘Good practice for getting back to Yorkshire, then.’ He climbed in, closed the door and switched the engine on.
She limped up to his open window. ‘I suppose you’d rather spend your shift dragging out paperwork? Or maybe nicking hard-working citizens for being impolite to their drug addict neighbours?’ Heck put the car in gear. ‘You just get on with all that,’ she added. ‘I’ll go look for Genene. I’ll start with this character Ballamara.’
Heck glanced round at her.
She smiled as she retreated. ‘If I can find you, I can surely find him.’
‘Miss Wraxford …?’
Despite having hurt her leg, she moved quickly away, stopping first at the wrecked van and pulling a heavy Bergen backpack out of it.
‘Hey, Miss Wraxford!’
She ignored him, hoisting the pack onto her back and starting to walk.
He spun the car around after her, but she deliberately veered off the lot onto broken ground, crossing it diagonally towards the unmade track that had brought them here. It was several minutes later before he could pull up alongside her again.
‘You are not to go looking for Bobby Ballamara!’ he said through his window. ‘You understand me?’
‘What is he?’ she scoffed. ‘A gangster? You think that scares me? You think anyone in London scares me? I come from Leeds.’
‘Just forget Bobby Ballamara. He’s nothing to do with this case.’
‘Let’s see what
he’s
got to say about it …’
‘You’ll be putting yourself in extreme danger …’
She laughed loudly. ‘The time for playing it safe is over! We’ve been waiting three years to hear from you lot. There hasn’t been a damn peep, so now my family has trusted
me
to get some answers. With or without your help.’
Before he could reply, she cut back across the spoil land, heading towards the main road. She was still limping, but covered the ground quickly, ‘yomping’ army style. By the time he reached the main road, she was on its verge, thumbing for a lift.
‘You’re more trouble than you’re bloody worth!’ he shouted, pulling up.
‘Yeah?’ She shifted away from him. ‘Disappointingly, you’ve been no trouble at all.’
He jumped from the car. ‘Do I have to arrest you for taking that transit van without its owner’s consent?’
She looked surprised. ‘I hired it.’
‘And now you’ve dumped it.’
‘I’ll phone them and tell them where it is.’
‘I can still take you in.’
‘Go on then.’ She folded her arms and waited. ‘I won’t resist. Only you didn’t lock me up when I threatened to knife you … what’s changed this time?’
Heck couldn’t at first respond. In truth, there wasn’t an answer he could give her.
‘Get in the car,’ he finally said.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be reading me my rights?’
‘You’re not under arrest. Just get in the car.’
Warily, she did as he asked, sliding into the front passenger seat.
Heck sighed as he walked around to the driver’s door. He wasn’t quite sure why he was doing this. But there was more truth in what the girl had said than even she might realise. Besides, he wasn’t much of a tough guy when it came to human suffering. Too many cops turned a blind eye to it – either as a defensive mechanism to stop it upsetting them, or because they were heartless shithouses who genuinely didn’t care.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, as he climbed in.
‘First, I want proof that you’re who you say you are.’
She felt under her sweat top and produced a driving licence. From the ID and photograph, she was indeed Lauren Wraxford.
‘You’ve got bottle, Lauren, I’ll give you that,’ he said, as he switched the engine on and pulled away from the kerb. ‘You’ve also got a grievance. I reckon the very least I can do is buy you a cup of coffee.’
Heck pulled off the A580 on the outskirts of Manchester, into a bustling lorry park, where he halted, climbed out and headed on foot to a scruffy café sandwiched between a mountain of old tyres and a dilapidated shed with a sign over its lintel reading ‘TOILET’. Lauren got out as well, and leaned against the bonnet of the car as she watched him.
In his jeans, sweater and leather jacket, her chaperon didn’t look much like a cop, though she supposed he was a little more presentable now than he had been the previous night, when he’d been drunk and dishevelled and acting like a smartarse in that crappy London pub. Mind you, she supposed she’d looked a bit of a sight herself, dolled up like a teenage hooker.
She glanced over her shoulder into his car. A mass of paperwork had spilled from a zip folder on the back seat. It would be so easy just to stick her head in there and have a quick scan through it – but he might catch her and she didn’t want that. For the moment, she needed to keep him on side. Last night, she’d even have let him take her back to his pad and screw her, if that was what he’d wanted. She’d believed that firmly at the time, and she still believed it now. That was how desperate she was to learn more about his investigation. Hell, it might even have been a pleasure. He wasn’t unfanciable, in a rumpled, hard-bitten sort of way, though in truth Lauren rarely had time for love. Even when things were going well – and it was a long time since she’d been able to say that – sex was a purely mechanical process for her, designed to satisfy an urgent physical need. She’d had several lovers before, even a couple of proper boyfriends, but if there’d been anything deep and meaningful there, it had slipped past her.
‘How’s the leg?’ Heck asked, returning with two lidded Styrofoam beakers.
Lauren realised that she’d been rubbing at it. ‘It’ll be okay. Banged my knee on the steering column when I crashed.’
He handed her a coffee. ‘Seriously … you’d better report that van stolen as soon as you can, or you’re going to get locked up.’
‘Won’t they check for prints, and see there are none there but mine?’
‘They won’t swab an old donkey-wagon like that for a minor offence like TWOC.’ He glanced at her. ‘I mean … so long as there’s nothing in it that shouldn’t be there.’
‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing.’
He leaned next to her on the car, sipping his own drink, watching the afternoon traffic shunt noisily past. ‘So your family sent you to find your sister?’
Lauren sighed. ‘Not really. My family is basically my mum, Angel.’
‘That’s her name?’
‘Yep.’ Fleetingly, Lauren almost sounded scornful. ‘Angel by name, angel by nature. She didn’t want me to come at all. She said we should leave it to you lot.’
‘Sounds like a sensible woman.’
‘Oh, she’s dead sensible, my mum.’ Lauren sipped at her coffee. ‘So sensible that even though she’s white, she married a black bloke back in the 1970s. Any idea what that meant back then – living in East Leeds?’
Heck pondered. ‘Can’t have been easy. But what does your dad think about this adventure you’ve embarked on?’
‘Nothing. He was killed in an accident working on the railway … six years after they got wed. Left my mum to bring up two mixed-race kids on her own, on one of the roughest estates you’ve ever seen. And with no help from either side of the family, who, surprise-surprise, didn’t want anything to do with her anymore.’
At one time Lauren would have been too embarrassed to elaborate on some of the things she’d experienced in her earliest youth: seeing her mother have to clean words written in excrement off their council flat door every morning. At the time the words had held no meaning for her, but the little girl had been able to read them and had stored them in her memory until she was older, and now there was no doubt in her mind about what phrases like ‘white niggers’ meant.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘One day we received a letter put together with clippings of newspaper type. It went something like: “Watch out, because next I’m getting a wog or a wog lover. Signed … the Yorkshire Ripper.” Mum took it to the police, but they told her to ignore it, saying it was nothing more than a joke. A joke … for a single mum and two young daughters living on their own in that wasteland. Some joke, eh?’
‘
Pretty grim,’ Heck acknowledged. ‘No wonder you and Genene were close.’
‘Well … we weren’t as close as we perhaps could have been.’
‘Whatever, your Genene did very well to get to uni after a start in life like that.’
‘That was Mum’s doing.’ Again, Lauren almost sounded resentful. ‘She set us the best example she could. After Dad died, she took on two jobs – sitting on a supermarket till all day and checking coats at a nightclub in the evening – just so we didn’t want for anything. She pushed us at school as well. Insisted we be polite and ladylike, that we ignore the taunts and hatred around us. I freely admit Genene managed it better than I did …’
Lauren’s words faded, and this time she declined to elaborate further, not mentioning how when it was her own turn to be encouraged to attend school on time, to look smart in her uniform and deliver her homework promptly, Angel Wraxford had aged prematurely, stress and chain-smoking turning her into a pathetic shadow of the creature she’d once been; and how, as such, there hadn’t been quite as much support for the younger sister as there had for the older.
‘Anyway,’ Lauren said decidedly. ‘Enough of this boring crap about me. It’s Genene I’m interested in. You’re saying there’s absolutely nothing about this you can tell me?’
Heck shrugged. ‘Only that the disappearance is being investigated.’
‘Just by you, or by others as well?’
‘Every case has an adequate number of investigators attached.’
‘So where are the rest of them?’
‘We all have different duties …’
‘Can’t you give me a straight answer?’ She was visibly struggling to stop herself getting irate again. ‘All you’re doing is taking me round the houses.’
‘Look … I wish I could tell you there was a whole team of us.’
She nodded, having suspected this all along. ‘And why isn’t there?’
‘Finance, politics.’ He sipped tiredly at his coffee. ‘All the usual reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with fighting crime.’
‘And what’s your gut feeling? I mean, you’re at the heart of this. Do
you
know what happened to Genene?’
‘No.’
‘She can’t have just vanished.’
‘People vanish all the time, Lauren. Police stations up and down the country are crammed with “missing persons” reports.’
‘How many of them do you recover?’
‘Some.’
‘Some?’
‘A few.’
‘A minority?’