Strangers

‘I’ve broken down, you see,’ the woman said, apparently oblivious to all this. ‘I don’t know what it was but I just kept losing power and stalling. I’d only just managed to get off the road when I saw your vehicle. I could really use someone to look at the engine.’

‘Look at the engine …? I’m, whoa … I’m not a mechanic.’

‘Please help,’ she said, her smile faltering, her voice softening with distress. ‘I don’t want to get stuck all the way out here.’

‘Can’t you just call a garage?’ he said, and immediately cursed himself. That would be all they needed, a vehicle-recovery team showing up.

But now the woman spoke again, taking a couple of steps towards him, unzipping the front of her anorak. To his disbelief, he saw that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

‘There must be something I can do,’ she said, ‘to make you change your mind.’

‘Miss, I …’ Barney turned hoarse, his mouth dry of spittle. ‘You can’t be …’

She beckoned him with a long, crimson-tipped finger, before slowly backtracking.

Barney wondered if he was actually unconscious and dreaming. Even though a voice inside kept telling him that this didn’t happen in real life, he followed her anyway – back around the front nearside corner of the van and down along the flank of it towards the deep shadows where her own vehicle was parked.

As Kev made his way back to the van, he quietly fumed.

A small man, of thin, wiry stature, the last item he’d taken – the larger of the two mattresses – had almost overwhelmed him with its size and weight. He’d dropped it several times en-route; it had subsequently smeared mud all over the front of his white shell-suit top.

It was no one’s fault obviously, but Barney was still going to cop it verbally.

A bloke his size ought to have gone straight to the heavier items, rather than leaving them for his mate. And where the fuck was he anyway? They ought to have passed each other again by now. Kev was secretly hoping that, whatever remained in the van – and it couldn’t have been much – Barney would take care of it all himself.

But then he came in sight of the vehicle. And stopped short.

Who the bloody hell had been so inconsiderate as to park up behind them?

Surely to God Barney hadn’t been right and, by a one in a million chance, some lazy-arsed copper had happened to drive past and spot what they were up to?

‘These bastards!’ Kev said under his breath, spittle seething through his clenched teeth.

But then he realised that the other vehicle wasn’t a police car. At least, not a marked one.

He padded forward, wondering why both vehicles appeared to be unmanned. If nothing else, Barney still ought to be hanging around. Unless he too had thought the new arrivals were coppers, and had headed for the hills.

That would be so fucking typical.

The big daft prat never watched the news, of course. Dear Lord, they weren’t even sending burglars down these days. Did Barn seriously expect they’d find prison space for fly-tippers? Of course, even if such stupidity explained why Barney was absent, it offered no clue about the car behind. By the looks of it, it was a relatively new Ford Mondeo. A posh bit of kit to be driving on a rubbish-strewn wasteland like this.

Then, without warning, the van’s headlights came on, catching Kev in their full beam. He backed away a step, raising his hand to block the dazzle.

‘Whoa!’ he shouted. ‘Barney, that you?’

The van’s engine chugged and coughed, and grumbled to life.

With a CLUNK, it was thrown into gear – and then rocketed forward.

‘Jesus!’ Kev screamed.

It crunched headlong into him, its front bumper-bar slamming his thighs with sledge-hammer force, snapping them both like sticks of celery, its windscreen smashing into his face with explosive force.

Kev was carried forward for several yards, spread-eagled, before the driver hit the brakes. The van screeched to a halt in front of the Portakabin, and he slumped to the ground. At the same time, a heavy, cumbersome form catapulted down from on top of the van’s roof, and landed with a thud on the gritty floor next to him.

Kev was only vaguely aware what had happened. His body felt like a heap of disjointed wood. There was no feeling in it, and when he tried to turn his head sideways, his neck burned with a bone-deep fire. Even so, he managed to focus on the prone figure at his side. This too was in a broken, bedraggled state, but its face, which had been worked over with some heavy implement until it was gory pulp, was just about recognisable. As Barney.

This made no sense to Kev.

Barn had been on the roof of the van?

Who put him there?

A pair of feet trudged up behind him. Kev wanted to glance around, but his neck was hurting too badly. With a slow exhalation of breath, someone sank to their knees.

‘Two trophies for the price of one,’ a hoarse voice snickered.

To Kev’s incredulity, his flies were pulled down and someone started unbuttoning his skinny jeans.

‘Did you really think you were going to get some?’ the voice whispered. ‘You little shit! You little rodent! Did you and that brainless hunk of meat seriously believe you were going to tap this perfect arse?’

Kev still didn’t understand. Chill air embraced him as his underpants were ripped away.

These bastards, he thought as he ebbed into unconsciousness.

Chapter 7

The Intel Unit convened that first Monday, in their office on the top floor at Robber’s Row – to find that some wag from somewhere else in the nick had already attached a paper sign to the door, which read:

Ripper Chicks

As a general rule, there was dark humour, and then there was black humour, and then there was police humour. It was a psychological defence mechanism, of course. The best way to fend off the stress of spending every day steeped to your armpits in human misery was by laughing at it. But even by those standards, this was seen by several of the girls as a little close to the knuckle. Some, on the other hand, thought it rather catchy.

‘Kind of rolls off the tongue,’ PC Julie Ebbsworth from Oldham said. ‘We are the Rrrriiipper Chicks!’

‘Well, the blokes have always had cool nicknames, haven’t they,’ DC Val Ashworth from Preston replied. ‘They’ve had the Shots, the Protectors, the Sweeney. Why can’t we be the Ripper Chicks?’

Perhaps if they’d been investigating the ripping apart of female victims, consensus that they weren’t offended by it would not have been achieved so quickly. It might also have been the case that, given what they were all about to undergo – and no doubt this had been preying on several of their minds for the whole of the weekend – this mischievous rebranding of their unit by an outside party did not seem such a big deal.

When agreement was reached, DS Sally Bryant agreed to leave the sign there. In fact, she said she’d take it home with her after shift and have it laminated so that it could be a permanent fixture on their office door.

After this, they got down to business, using the locker room attached to the briefing room to change from the casual attire they’d worn to travel to work, to the street-gear they hoped would help them blend in when they hit the streets.

Lucy had chosen a clingy blue camisole with lacy ribbons down the front rather than buttons, blue satin hot pants, fishnets and blue suede thigh-boots with platform soles. Over the top, she wore a black plastic mac. Her hair hung loose, while her make-up was loud and garish. All the girls affected similar transformations, looking each other over approvingly before deciding they were ready. There were some titters and sniggers, but an air of nervousness prevailed as the realisation finally dawned that they were going out there more or less alone. They’d have their phones and their ‘guardian angels’, as the plain-clothes TSG guys were now being referred to, but none of them would be carrying radios or wires. If they got into a cat-fight, they’d been advised, they’d have to see it through on their own (unless it turned very nasty), because it was always possible that communications devices could be exposed through yanked or torn clothing.

Lucy was only thirty, but she was actually one of the oldest present and certainly the most experienced. Deferring to this, more than a couple of the other girls came over seeking words of comfort or encouragement, neither of which she was able to offer in abundance. Detective Sergeants Bryant and Clark were in a similar boat; technically, they were the girls’ line-managers, but in reality they’d be role-playing themselves and thus unable to act as normal supervision.

Shortly after three, DI Slater appeared, having run through several pointers with the male members of the team in the next room along. He now went through everything again with the girls, and then gave them a quick pep talk.

‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ he said. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that. Ordinarily, we’d put you through a month’s training for a job like this, but there simply isn’t time. It may interest you to know – and this is totally embargoed, so don’t go blabbing – we’ve got another couple of APs. Both were found this morning on wasteland near Bickershaw.’

There was a dumbfounded silence in the room. If there’d been any doubts in any minds about the necessity of this action-plan, they’d been expunged now.

‘They may be ours, they may not be,’ Slater said, ‘but … well, they probably are. All the signs are there. If so, that makes it six victims and counting. Ladies, this assailant is absolutely relentless and the public is getting wind of it. When this next two hit the headlines, there’ll be a total circus, which’ll mean extra pressure on the investigation team, more stress, more mistakes. We need to pull together and get it sorted. So go out there and do your job, but watch your backs as well, and I mean watch them closely. The more men die at the hands of Jill the Ripper – sorry, I hate using that name but I don’t see what difference objecting to it will make now – the more vulnerable you people are going to be.’

Lucy would find out for herself what Slater meant by this approximately one hour after arriving at her designated pitch, which was a small picnic area – in reality little more than a thinly treed grass verge – just off the stretch of the A580 dual carriageway, better known locally as the East Lancashire Road or ‘East Lancs’, that ran south-west from Boothstown towards Lowton.

Her guardian angel that evening was PC Andy Clegg, a TSG officer in his early twenties. He was a bullish lad, well built around the chest and arms, but whose regulation-cut dark hair, ruddy, chubby features and permanently grave expression only served to underline his youth. Lucy wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged by this or unnerved. When they chatted before setting off, Lucy seeking nothing more than an informal introduction, he responded to her questions in taut monosyllables, which suggested that he was either very focused on the job, which was good, or that he was tongue-tied and abashed in the presence of a female officer who happened to be showing leg and cleavage, which wasn’t so good. There was a time to be embarrassed, and this wasn’t it.

Clegg would be sitting in an unmarked car on wasteland on the other side of the East Lancs – a battered old relic of a Ford Focus, equipped with a pair of night-vision binoculars. Without doubt he’d have the physical ability to help her, and the willingness to get stuck in – young male coppers were nothing if not reckless in their efforts to prove themselves. She just hoped he had the judgement to go with it.

And this was to be tested as soon as they arrived at her pitch.

Lucy was dropped off at the picnic site by an unmarked van with fake company logos on the sides. The hoped-for impression was that she’d just successfully serviced a bunch of navvies. The TSG lads inside the van assisted by beating on its sides and whooping aloud as the vehicle roared away. Following this, she stood out in the open, which wasn’t difficult given the proximity of the streetlights and the semi-leafless state of the autumnal trees, brandished a fistful of twenty-pound notes, and commenced a slow, deliberate count.

It had the desired effect.

Two girls were waiting nearby, only half discernible in the dank shadows. One of them was black, one of them white; both wore leather jackets, short skirts and heels. They sauntered towards her side-by-side.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ the white girl wondered, her accent strong Scouse.

‘Who’s asking?’ Lucy replied, tucking the money up the sleeve of her mac.

The black girl leaned forward menacingly, an impression enhanced by an old scar that diagonally bisected her mouth and was still clearly visible despite a preponderance of emulsion-like lip gloss. ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with you, you gobby bitch!’ she snarled. ‘This is our pitch and you’re fucking trespassing!’

Lucy shrugged, but her spine was already tingling. ‘Don’t see a signpost, love.’

The black girl snapped her hand out, and a gleaming blade sprang into view. ‘I’ll slice your fucking tits off, you cow!’

‘Or alternatively, you can pay up,’ the Scouse girl said.

Lucy gazed from one to the other, affecting dimness. ‘What?’

‘We share everything here. And we know you’re not short of cash given that road crew you’ve just balled … so cough up.’

Even from across the dual carriageway, Lucy heard a thud from the back of the Ford Focus, as if Clegg was already getting set to intervene. That’d be great. She could just picture him clumping across the blacktop in his army surplus trousers, hoodie top and baseball cap. He’d save her of course, but it’d be quite a coincidence – that the moment the new girl was threatened, a tall, dark stranger stepped in.

But by a miracle, perhaps suggesting that he was smarter than she’d thought, he held off.

‘So I have to pay you two for the privilege of standing here?’ Lucy said. ‘On this stretch of public highway which anyone else can use free of charge?’

‘See,’ the Scouse girl said to her mate. ‘Told you she was clever.’

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Lucy said, suspecting they were bluffing but now knowing she had to call that bluff.

‘This look funny to you?’ The black girl offered the blade again.

Though its glinting steel tip was now right under Lucy’s nose, less than an inch from severing her septum, she was determined to remain composed. That was all you could ever do in this job, pretend. It didn’t mean that, deep inside, her heart wasn’t going like the clappers.

‘Go on then,’ Lucy said. ‘Cut me up. I wonder what would make Mr Merryweather angrier? That … or the fact I had to share his hard-earned to buy you two off?’

The two prostitutes didn’t exactly flinch, but the blankness of their expressions said more than words ever could.

‘You don’t work for Nick Merryweather,’ the Scouse girl finally replied.

‘Not directly,’ Lucy agreed, ‘but we know whose pocket you’ll ultimately be picking, don’t we!’

She was onto a winner; she could tell. No one would believe that she had some kind of hotline to the Crew’s whoremaster-in-chief, but the mere fact she knew who he was would indicate that she was no novice, that she wasn’t just playing at this.

‘So go on, cut me!’ she urged them. ‘Or maybe you can put the sodding blade away … and just to show there’s no hard feelings, because yeah, I am trespassing a little bit, I can give you something to be going on with.’ She filched two twenties from under her sleeve, and offered one to each of them. Oddly enough, probably because this kind of thing had never happened before, they were hesitant to take them.

‘I’ve never seen you round here,’ the black girl said, still snarling, but the blade now lower. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘I’m Keira,’ Lucy said.

‘Keira?’ The black girl hooted. ‘Jesus wept, couldn’t you think of anything more fucking original?’

‘Who are you?’ Lucy asked her.

‘I’m not telling you my fucking name.’ The girl pocketed her switchblade, but snatched the twenty and backed away. ‘Just piss off, you silly fucking mare.’

The Scouse lass gave Lucy a long, searching look – as if somehow suspecting this thing still wasn’t right – then helped herself to her own twenty, taking it almost gingerly between thumb and forefinger, before turning on her heel and hurrying to catch up with her mate, the pair of them dwindling off along the leaf-cluttered verge.

Lucy watched them as she slowly calmed herself down, wondering if any kind of bridge had been built there or perhaps if it was quite the opposite.

‘You won’t make friends that way, love,’ a voice said from somewhere to the right, seeming to answer the question for her. ‘They’ll just mark you as a soft touch and try and scam you again.’

Lucy turned to the trees and had to squint through the darkness under their half-naked boughs. The dull yellow glow of the streetlights didn’t penetrate too far. However, her eyes were now attuning, and she realised that a third party was close at hand. Another girl, younger than the others by the looks of her, with longish red hair and a very short dress, was seated on top of a picnic table, high-heeled shoes resting on the bench in front of her, as she swigged from a bottle of vodka.

‘And you’re not part of Necktie Nicky’s stable neither,’ she said, screwing the cap back on and giving a satisfied belch. ‘You wouldn’t dare give that much of his dosh away if you were.’

Lucy ambled towards her. ‘I admit I’ve never met Mr Merryweather personally …’

‘No one has who’s so far down the food-chain that they have to walk these streets, love. Anyway, you can spare me the bullshit …’ The red-headed girl climbed down. ‘I know what you really are.’

Lucy held her tongue, unsure how to respond.

The girl slid the bottle into her shoulder bag, and struggled with the zip of her scruffy fleece jacket before finally drawing it up. She was shapely but short, not much more than five feet tall. There was no threat here, but the last thing Lucy needed was to be outed on her first night. She wondered what it was that might have given the game away.

‘You’re an independent, aren’t you?’ the girl said.

Up close, even in the gloom, Lucy could see that she had a pretty face, though she smelled strongly of alcohol. If Lucy hadn’t been very used to it thanks to all the drunken prisoners she’d wheeled in over the years, it would have been nauseating.

‘And you’re new to the game,’ the girl added. ‘You know how I can tell? Because you haven’t got the thousand-yard stare. I’m Tammy, by the way. And that’s my real name too. I was christened Tamara. Can you fucking believe that?’

It was an odd way to introduce herself; delivered in a casual, only half-interested tone, as if the information barely mattered.

‘Keira,’ Lucy said.

‘Yeah, I heard. So what’s the story, Keira? Lost your job? House repossessed? Kids hungry?’

‘Something like that.’

‘And you thought this’d be a piece of piss?’

‘Not exactly a piece of piss.’

‘Easy money then?’

Lucy shrugged, took the wad of notes from under her sleeve and screwed it up into a ball. ‘You telling me I just got lucky when I met that gang of workmen?’

Tammy eyed the money as it disappeared into Lucy’s bag. ‘Sometimes we get lucky, I suppose.’ She took a step back, this time eyeing Lucy herself. ‘You don’t look the worse for wear considering you’ve just been star-attraction in a backseat gangbang.’

Lucy realised her mistake. She should have smeared her lippy and mussed her hair a little. But it was too late now. She could only brazen it out.

‘How many were there?’ Tammy asked.

‘Three.’

‘Jesus! Talk about getting off to a flyer. Anyway … your minge must be killing you, which means this one’s for me.’

Lucy hadn’t realised it, but another vehicle had drawn up at the verge just behind them: a grey SUV with tinted windows. The front nearside window rolled downward.

There were two guys inside it, one behind the wheel and one in the front passenger seat. This immediately struck Lucy as a potential problem, though if Tammy needed the custom, who was she to object? As the girl teetered across the grassy verge in her ridiculously high heels, the passenger grinned, white teeth splitting his thick black beard. He was somewhere in his early thirties, brawny and wearing a lumberjack-style plaid shirt.

‘You gents looking for a good time?’ Tammy tittered, leaning down at the window.

Plaid Shirt’s expression rapidly changed – from lewd grin to twisted scowl.

‘YOU MURDERING SLAGS!’ he screamed, before throwing something into her face.

Lucy caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark, lumpen object wrapped in what looked like white tissue. The next thing, Tammy’s hoarse voice rang out, an exclamation of horror and disgust, as she tottered backwards. The SUV sped away, howls of mocking laughter echoing from its interior. When Tammy turned to face Lucy, the excrement was smeared down her left cheek and around the side of her mouth. Solid fragments of it spattered her décolletage; a strip of filthy toilet paper had tucked itself into her cleavage.

Quite clearly, the two most recent murders had finally hit the headlines.

‘Dirty bastards!’ Tammy stammered, eyes glimmering with tears of shock.

Lucy hurried over to her. ‘Here, let me help.’

She had some face wipes in her shoulder bag, but Tammy tried to pull away, too embarrassed in front of the new girl to allow herself to be assisted.

‘No,’ Lucy said, refusing to release her arm. ‘Let me help.’

‘Not here, for fuck’s sake!’ Tammy snapped, voice turning nasal as the tears flowed. ‘God, the stink!’

‘I can clean it off,’ Lucy insisted.

‘Yeah, but not out here!’ Tammy yanked her arm loose and strutted quickly away, working her way deeper into the copse of trees, heels clacking as she joined a paved pathway, which snaked from the road into denser shadows. Lucy followed, shoving the wipes back into her bag. Fleetingly, Tammy was invisible in the darkness ahead – it was only possible to follow her by her footfalls and sniffles. By the sounds of it, she’d quickly got on top of the tears. Probably couldn’t afford not to in this line of work. Lucy accelerated and fell into step alongside her. The path weaved away from the picnic area towards what looked like an open, well-lit space, though they passed several more girls before they got there, most of them standing talking quietly, indistinguishable in the darkness, only the tiny red pinpoints of cigarettes and the occasional whiff of cannabis revealing their presence.

Tammy sniffled again and tried to wipe under her eyes, inadvertently smearing her fingertips with excrement. ‘Bastards!’ she hissed. ‘Can’t fucking believe this!’

‘Nor me,’ Lucy agreed.

‘Yeah, but you’re new. I ought to have learned my lesson by now.’

The path ended at the edge of what was actually a lorry park. This was a rectangular dirt lot, rugged and rutted at this time of year, and about thirty acres in size. It was still close to the East Lancs, extending along it in a southerly direction, but was encircled on three sides by trees and undergrowth. At the far side stood a single-storey red-brick building, a combo of service garage and lorry drivers’ cafe.

‘There are some toilets round the back,’ Tammy muttered as they walked over there, passing numerous trucks and wagons, some old and some new, some with curtained interiors.

When they reached the building, they circled round it, away from its glazed, brightly glowing frontage, passing a row of bins and a pile of spare but rusting auto-parts. At the very rear, two doors stood covered with flaking paint. One was marked ‘Gents’, the other ‘Ladies’.

Two more girls were standing here, chatting as they smoked. One of them, a bottle-blonde in a fur coat and a preponderance of mascara, spotted them as they approached. Initially she looked shocked, but then she grinned,