Strangers

‘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.’