Текст книги "Bones in the Nest"

Автор книги: Helen Cadbury

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Doncaster

No sooner had Lizzie got started on a fingertip search of AK News, than her phone buzzed in her pocket. Fully covered in protective gear, she decided it could wait. She was mapping the trajectory of petrol traces and collecting up sooty glass fragments: clear, green and brown. Window and bottle glass, she guessed, but a quick look under the microscope when she got back to the lab would confirm that. The shelves of alcohol behind the counter had been badly damaged but the newspaper section had come off worst, spirits accelerating the fire had caught the dry paper. Next to the till the lottery stand had melted and bent over, like a Dali clock. A few minutes later her phone buzzed again. She stepped out into the street and peeled off a glove. The fire officer was watching her as she unzipped her white suit. She turned her back on him and pulled the phone out of her trouser pocket.

The voicemail said to drop what she was doing and get to Halsworth Grange, where someone had kindly provided them with a fresh body. Dr Alf Huggins, the pathologist, had a dry sense of humour, but there was an element of honesty in his delight: it was usually easier to gather evidence from a recent death than a crowd attack on a property.

She put in a call to Donald Chaplin to ask him to come and finish off here. He was a gentle, avuncular soul, who might bore the fire officer to death with the chemical properties of the reagents he was using, but he’d do a thorough job while he was at it. She slipped out of her over-suit and shoe covers, bagged them up and left them for Donald to dispose of, in case she caused cross-contamination with the next site. She started the car and cruised past the parade of shops. The name, ‘AK News’, was just visible, but ‘and Convenience Store’ had blistered and peeled into a blackened mess. The broken window was covered with a temporary screen. Most of these shops had heavy toughened glass and it would take more than a bottle to smash through a window like that.

‘Of course,’ she said and put her foot on the brake. She dialled Donald’s number.

‘Sorry to bother you, Don,’ she spoke to his voicemail, ‘but when you get to the scene, can you have a look to see if there’s something in there that shouldn’t be? A mark made by a pole or something else that you’d use to break strong glass?’

Lizzie set her satnav and let the voice of Elvis Presley guide her to Halsworth Grange. The satnav had been a Christmas present from her ex-boyfriend, who’d loaded the programme of celebrity voices and preselected the King. She kept expecting it to say, Elvis has now left the motorway, but it never did. She remembered the framed Elvis print at Sean Denton’s grandmother’s house, that night, a couple of years back, the night she’d realised he fancied her. He’d changed a lot since then, grown up, she thought. She hoped he’d got a nice girlfriend now; he deserved one.

Lizzie didn’t think she would ever be nice girlfriend material. She’d tried to keep things going with Guy, the Doncaster Rovers marketing manager, when she moved to London, but she saw less and less of him and began to see more and more of someone else. The overlap was messy and she wasn’t proud of herself, but life was changing so quickly. She was seconded to a unit in Scotland Yard and briefly believed that this was the beginning of a new life, until she discovered the new boyfriend had a serious coke habit, which could have jeopardised her career. Breaking up with him felt like a physical injury. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t think straight. She was signed off sick and came home to her parents, who fussed and faffed and said: I told you so. Then her dad put the keys of the flat in Regent Square in her hand, put a good word in with his friend, Commander Laine, and suddenly she was a crime scene manager again. As Elvis guided her out through the villages she’d known all her life, an idea began to take shape. She could speak to Laine about Sean’s suspension. He’d listen to her, she was sure, and he could be made to see that it would be madness to lose such a promising young officer. She pulled into the car park of a pub and dialled his number.

The road to Halsworth Grange took her back to a family outing, years ago. Her mother thought it dingy and couldn’t understand why they didn’t do it up, but that was the point. The inside of the house had been left exactly as it was when the last Lady Halsworth died. The cracks in the walls and ceilings were testament to how the family made their money from the coal seam underneath. Her dad told her and her brother, for the hundredth time, that their great-grandfather had mined that very seam and if it hadn’t been for the grammar school they’d be down there still, digging for coal in the darkness.

‘Except the pit’s shut now,’ her brother had pointed out.

‘And I’m a girl,’ Lizzie added, ‘and girls haven’t gone down the mines since Lord Shaftesbury banned it.’ And then they took their overeducated, smug little selves to play outside on the play equipment. God, she marvelled at how snooty they were.

At the bottom of the Halsworth Grange drive, she waved her ID at the constable manning the gate and drove up to the car park, where another constable flagged her down and showed her where to leave her car. The car park itself was cordoned off. As she passed it, she noticed a group of angry people remonstrating with a woman at the ticket office about when they could get their vehicles out.

‘When I’m good and ready,’ Lizzie said to herself.

It amazed her that people could be so lacking in public spirit. You would think it was in their interest to solve a crime, but they behaved like it was a deliberate attempt to personally inconvenience them. At the foot of a half-mown slope of grass, a small white tent had already been erected. The whole field was taped off in a wide strip from the car park to the edge of a wooden fence and there were groups of police and CSIs nervously clustered on either side.

A tall, thickset man was in conversation with one of the uniforms. He occasionally nodded or shook his head. Every now and then he stole a glance at a woman cowering in the back seat of one of the police cars. Lizzie’s new deputy was coming towards her. Janet Wheeler, ex-hockey player for the Scottish national team, held out her hand and shook Lizzie’s with gusto.

‘Great. Good,’ Janet said. ‘Glad you got here so quickly. The pathologist is down there now. He wants us there tout de suite so we can get what we can before CID get their feet all over the scene.’

It was warm in the protective suit and once she was inside the tent, she realised they were going to have to work quickly. The smell told her that the body was fresh, but decomposing fast and they were competing with flies. She wished she hadn’t been so stubborn about waiting to check her phone in the shop. Janet was an excellent deputy, and everything was how it should be, but she should have been here sooner herself.

The photographer was covering every angle of the young woman, but Lizzie needed to stand back and make her own mental picture before they moved her. What she saw was almost a mirror image of the boy in the stairwell: a foetal position, the body left where it fell, except this victim’s wound was to her neck, a deep cut to her throat, which ended below her left ear. When they turned her, they’d be able to see where it started. Blood had soaked into the ground, spreading across grass and compacted leaf mould. The blood had sprayed out and spattered the victim’s top.

‘Left-handed killer,’ Lizzie said out loud.

‘Go on,’ said Dr Huggins, who was testing the body temperature with an ear thermometer.

‘That looks like the end of the wound, because the skin’s wide open as the blade exits,’ she said. ‘It’s commensurate with the perpetrator being behind her, so he’s slit her throat from right to left. Odd though, a messy exit as he’s pulled the knife away. Like it’s snagged and he’s had to yank the wound wide open.’

‘Any reason you’re using the masculine?’

‘Sir?’

‘It’s just that the prime suspect is female.’

‘That woman they’ve got sitting in the car? You’re joking.’

‘I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that,’ Dr Huggins said. ‘We need to be very clear about what’s in front of us, Lizzie. If you have the slightest shred of doubt that this is the work of a five-foot, six-inch female, who looks like she weighs in at less than eight stone, than you’ll need to be cast iron with the facts. Otherwise CID will throw the book at her and she doesn’t look like she’s got the strength to dodge it.’

‘Did she find the body?’

‘We don’t know. She’s not speaking. The big fellow called 999. Mr Coldacre. The young woman was mowing the grass and had come to a standstill. But Coldacre says she knew the victim, so it would be useful if she did decide to talk. There’s no ID on the body, no handbag, no wallet and no cars unaccounted for in the car park, but I’m sure the detective will fill you in.’

Lizzie squatted down by the victim’s feet. The pink sandals were marked with fresh grass stains and had picked up the crushed head of a clover flower. She bagged the flower and handed it to Janet.

‘OK, let’s start a fingertip of the field. Look for footsteps in the long grass. And get someone to go through the cuttings from that lawnmower.’

‘Here,’ Huggins was pointing to a mark on the girl’s arm. ‘Someone gripped her hard. That mark is recent, discolouration is what I’d expect from the estimated time of death.’

‘Good, we’ll be able to get something off it, prints hopefully or maybe sweat. But first, my little beauties,’ Lizzie opened her kit box and took out a piece of sticky paper. She peeled off the backing and drew the paper carefully through the air where a couple of flies were trying their luck over the pool of coagulating blood. ‘Come to mama. Gotcha!’

‘Delightful,’ Huggins said dryly. ‘I’m pretty much done until we get her on the slab.’

‘Time of death?’

‘About five hours ago.’

‘We’ll see if the flies agree. Meanwhile, I’m OK for CID to come in now. Just need to swab this bruise.’

She brushed gently over the darkened skin and allowed herself, for a moment, to feel a wave of sorrow for this young woman who had either walked, or run, to her sudden and violent death in the undergrowth. She felt the ghost of a breeze as Huggins left the tent and heard the sound of low, male voices.

‘Miss Morrison,’ Khan nodded formally as he ducked into the tent, his eyes large and dark over a paper mask. She tried to set her face and her feelings to neutral. The way he’d treated Sean had lost Khan most of his remaining allies on the Doncaster team, but she had a job to do, so she tried to push that from her mind.

‘DCI Khan, you’re just in time to help me turn her over.’

‘Were you hoping for someone else? Another detective?’

She clearly hadn’t done the neutral face as well as she thought.

‘Not necessarily,’ she lied.

‘DI Houghton and DS Simkins are both on the Chasebridge estate today, following up the Asaf murder.’

‘Really?’ She was genuinely surprised. ‘I thought that was your case?’

‘I’ve been informed I am too emotionally involved,’ he said, with a completely level voice, not meeting her eye. ‘Apparently that’s not seen as a problem when attending the untimely death of this young woman.’

He stretched out a gloved hand and lifted a gold chain that hung loosely over the girl’s breastbone. On his fingertip lay a tiny gold pendant, spelling out a trio of Arabic letters. His lips moved silently.

‘Shall we?’ She indicated it was time to turn the body.

As she slid her latex-gloved hands beneath the girl’s back, she felt the bone of the shoulder blade under her fingers. It was just like the scapula of a living person, the part you feel when you throw your arm round a friend’s shoulder.

‘Clothes appear intact, no obvious sexual assault?’ His clipped tone indicated he was back on the job, the moment of sympathy had passed.

‘As far as we can see,’ Lizzie said.

The young woman lay on her back, but the rigor in her limbs kept her knees bent. If there wasn’t a huge gaping wound in her neck, you might think it was someone lying on the grass to watch the clouds go by. The skin beneath her eyes was smudged where her mascara and eyeliner had run. Lizzie took a sample pot and swabbed the victim’s tear ducts and the skin beneath her lower lids.

‘It’s going to have a high sodium content,’ she said. ‘She’d been crying.’

She carefully picked a crushed purple rhododendron flower off the young woman’s thigh and lifted the thin cotton of her patterned smock to reveal that her calf-length trousers were done up, clean and undisturbed. ‘Huggins will do a proper check when we get her back. But you’re right. Her clothes show no sign of sexual assault. Nothing’s torn. Here, look, this stain’s too dark for grass. Algae maybe? On the lower inside of her trousers.’

‘What if she climbed over the wooden fence? Not dragged, at least I don’t think so, that would have made more mess.’

‘She definitely died here,’ Lizzie said. ‘Aside from the obvious fact she bled out where she fell, look at her knees.’ The fabric was slightly stained, not green, but yellowy brown and on one knee the body of a spider was pressed into the cotton. ‘Pisaura mirabilis. It’s their favourite kind of habitat. The rhododendron roots, not the cotton, I mean.’

‘Are you saying that someone persuaded her to climb over the fence into this dank undergrowth and got her to kneel down, before slitting her throat like a butcher?’ Khan said.

‘It looks like it.’

‘So someone who knew her? Who she went with willingly?’

‘That’s not a forensic question, Detective Chief Inspector. Unless the body tells us there wasn’t a struggle.’

‘And unless we already have a suspect for you to forensically examine.’

‘The girl in the car? What’s the connection?’

‘Her name is Chloe Toms. She’s on probation. Bill Coldacre, the tall chap you’ll have passed in the car park, doesn’t know the details, but says she handed over a disclosure letter, which he passed on to his boss without reading. He also said the victim visited Chloe and gave her a lift home last Monday. Chloe left in the victim’s car, a little cream Fiat. Coldacre was quite precise about that. The remake, he said, of the Cinquecento, and in his opinion, an improvement.’ Khan’s eyes creased in a momentary smile. ‘Coldacre hasn’t seen this young woman since, not until he found her lying here, dead.’

‘Does she have a name?’ Lizzie said.

‘Chloe isn’t speaking and Coldacre says he can’t remember if he was told, but he thinks it was a foreign name.’

‘Handy,’ Lizzie shook her head.

She looked again at the mark on the victim’s arm and held her own hand above it, trying to match the bruising with the spaces between her own fingers. ‘Let’s see if Chloe Toms has got bigger hands than me.’

The tent opened and Janet stuck her head in.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ Janet said, ‘but Dr Huggins is keen to get her bagged up, says the heat’s going to make his job harder when he gets her on the slab. And Lizzie, we’ve found two pink sequins in the grass mowings.’

‘Damn.’

Khan looked up, frowning.

‘Well, it means she walked across that bit before it was mown,’ Lizzie said, ‘making footprints or any other DNA much harder to find. Janet, bag up all the grass cuttings, just in case.’

‘A handy way to cover one’s traces,’ Khan said. ‘Use an industrial lawnmower to obliterate your footprints.’

Khan stood up, as much as the low tent would allow, and offered her a hand. She pretended not to notice and sprung up from her squat with a quick abdominal contraction.

‘She’s all yours, detective.’

The air outside was warm and dry, but degrees cooler than the tent. She felt her blouse unstick from her back as she stretched. On a branch of the rhododendron, which had been pushed aside to fit the tent over the body, something caught her eye: a long black hair, hooked to the broken stem of a leaf. She reached up for it and held it for a moment, before tucking it away in an evidence bag.

Chloe Toms was sitting in the back seat of the police car. Lizzie needed the young woman’s clothes, but there was nowhere obvious for her to change. Lizzie spotted a low brick shed.

‘What’s in there?’ she asked a female officer.

‘Potting shed, ma’am. Where the gardening team has its base.’

‘Can you ask the girl to come with me?’

The officer opened the car door. She reached to her belt for her handcuffs, but Lizzie stopped her.

‘It’s not my decision, of course, but do you think that’s really necessary? She’s not under arrest yet, as far as I know.’

The girl didn’t look like she had the strength to run. She got out of the car and stood still, waiting to be told what to do. Her face was pale and drawn, her limp, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. A patch of sweat had made a map of Africa through her olive green vest. Her limbs were spindly, shoulders pressing through the skin, but Lizzie could see she had strong, tight muscles roping up and down her arms. She clutched a baseball cap in her hands and as they started to walk towards the potting shed, she put it on, tugging the brim low.

In the cool, earthy stillness of the shed it took Lizzie a moment to become accustomed to the lack of light. The girl stared at the floor.

‘I’m a forensic specialist, Chloe. I’m not a police officer; I’m a scientist. I need to check your clothes for evidence, to see who’s been near the victim.’

The bony shoulders gave a barely perceptible shrug.

‘I need you to get undressed and put this plastic suit on. We’ll need your shoes too.’

She wished she didn’t have to put this young woman through the indignity of taking off her bra, but she’d learnt that the cleavage was a surprisingly useful place for catching particles. The girl didn’t care, she pulled off her vest top and held it out for Lizzie to catch in an evidence bag, unsnapped her bra and did likewise. Then she kicked off her shoes, peeled off her socks and let Lizzie pick them up while she dropped her trousers and offered them up for bagging. She stood naked except for her knickers. Lizzie was reminded of the pictures of liberated concentration camp victims. This girl might be muscular, but she didn’t look like she’d had a proper meal for weeks.

‘I’m sorry, but I need your knickers too.’

The female officer was watching and not watching at the same time, struggling to show Chloe Toms some dignity. She need not have bothered. Lizzie thought about what Khan had said. If she’d already served a sentence, she must have undressed in front of people in uniform many times over.

Lizzie handed her the forensic suit.

‘I’m going to swab your mouth and your fingers. And then the skin around your neck and chest.’

Lizzie couldn’t see any blood on Chloe’s clothes or skin. If she’d killed the victim as soon as she arrived at Halsworth Grange that morning, she would have needed access to a shower and a full change of clothes. Close up, Lizzie could smell she hadn’t been near a shower for a while.

When she was done, she sent Chloe Toms back to the car with the police officer. She hesitated in the cool quiet of the potting shed. Coldacre kept the place very neat and tidy. Brooms and rakes hung from wooden racks in the ceiling. A drawer in an old dresser revealed pairs of stiffened gardening gloves in large, medium and small sizes. Lizzie bagged them up. A cupboard was labelled ‘Hand Tools’. She pulled open the double doors and was confronted with an Aladdin’s Cave of axes, secateurs, trowels and saws, all dangling from leather loops on their handles from rows of horizontal pegs driven into the back of the cupboard. Her eyes scanned the gently swinging objects until they came to rest on a wooden-handled blade, which scooped round and ended in a sharp point.

‘That could do it,’ she said aloud in the silent, dusty shed and reached for it, barely noticing as the metal sliced across the fingertip of her latex glove.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Doncaster

Sean wandered slowly up towards the Eagle Mount flats. His dad would surely be awake by now, and, if he’d remembered anything at all about Sean staying there, he might be wondering where he was. Sean couldn’t face the stinking lift and took the stairs instead, his footsteps echoing off the concrete. He reached the first floor and heard the clunk of the lift arriving at the same level. He opened the door to the landing slowly, waiting to see who would step out of the lift. The metal doors jerked apart, but whoever was in there was moving with an equal degree of caution. Sean stayed on the stairs, letting the door close on the tip of his shoe, and levelled his eye up to the open crack as the slight figure of Saleem Asaf stepped out. The boy stood for a moment, listening, then approached Jack Denton’s door. He put his ear to the door and listened again. Saleem obviously didn’t like what he heard and pulled back.

Sean opened the door from the staircase and they looked at each other, frozen. Sean was about to say something when Saleem put his finger to his lips. Sean shrugged and held the door wide open for the boy, who slipped through and took off up the stairs, his footsteps so light he made no sound. Sean followed him.

They kept going up and up, until Saleem pointed to the roof and Sean felt an old chill of fear. Don’t go up on the roof, some kid got shoved off. But that was another time and another tower, and anyway, the killer had served her sentence. He put his hand on his back pocket to feel for the folded-up newspaper he’d been carrying that morning, but it wasn’t there. He must have dropped it on the way up.

The metal door to the service ladder had a broken lock and they were up and through the hatch in moments.

‘So?’ Sean said, taking in the view, breathless from climbing up ten floors. ‘What’s so important that we have to meet up here? Were you looking for me or do you often pay my dad a visit?’

‘Didn’t even know you had a dad, till someone told me.’

‘Who told you?’

Saleem shook his head. ‘I said to that other copper at the police station that I wanted to speak to you, that I would only speak to you. He just ignored me.’

‘Saleem, I’m not …’

‘On the case … yeah, he said that. But you’re safe, man. You’re the only one that is.’

‘You got into the back of the Health Centre right under my nose. Were you trying to get caught?’

Saleem grinned at him. ‘That’s what I mean: you’re the only one with any brains.’

Sean sighed. He wished he had Saleem’s faith in his abilities because none of this was making any sense at all. He walked across the roof and sat on a low wall that surrounded a large air extraction unit.

‘Can’t talk there,’ Saleem jerked his thumb at the white, slatted construction. ‘All the kitchen fans come out here. They might hear us.’ He walked towards the opposite corner of the tower, which looked across the ring road to the woods and the quarry beyond. ‘I heard about you. You’re the one that cracked that caravan case. You were famous, man. I wanted to be a copper for time after that, you know?’

‘You still could.’

Saleem barked out a laugh that had no humour in it. ‘Nah, I’m never going be like you. You’re the real thing, CID, plain clothes now and all that.’

‘Thank for your high opinion of me, Saleem, but I was only seconded, a temporary thing, and right now I don’t know what’s going to happen. I may be done with the police anyway; I’ve been suspended.’

‘Seriously?’

Sean nodded, wondering why he was telling him all his secrets.

‘Whose voice did you hear, Saleem? Downstairs?’

‘If I tell you stuff, you never heard any of it from me, OK? I don’t want anything to do with it. I get stuck in the middle and this happens.’

He lifted his sweatshirt and showed Sean the large gauze bandage over his stomach wound.

‘So why do you trust me?’

‘I want you to make sure Ghazala is looked after.’

‘What makes you think I can help?’

‘You know people: housing, social and that.’ Saleem shrugged like it was obvious. ‘Sooner or later, my luck’s going to run out, man. I’ll end up dead or inside.’

‘I won’t be able to stop that from happening. You need to make changes in your own life, Saleem.’

‘Whatever. Look, what I’m trying to say is, I’m worried about Ghazala. The shop’s gone, everything in the flat is ruined; she can’t live there. But if I’m not there, she’s got no one. People will push her around.’

‘What about your auntie?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Your dad?’

‘Worse, don’t ask.’

‘Saleem, how old is Ghazala? She must be able to make up her own mind.’

‘She’s twenty-two. My dad wanted her to go with him to Pakistan, to help look after my granddad, but she was scared to go. She didn’t want to come back with an old man for a husband, or not come back at all.’ Saleem seemed suddenly older than his years; his fidgety, streetwise energy had all but fizzled out. ‘She had some trouble with a boy, years ago. It messed up her marriage chances. Like I said, it’s complicated, but trust me, I don’t want her to be on her own.’

‘I’ll do what I can to help your sister,’ Sean stood up, moving closer to the boy, uneasy now he was standing so near the edge. The rail was only waist-height and flimsy. ‘But in return, I want you to tell me what you know about Terry Starkey.’

Saleem froze, the muscle in his cheek pulsing.

‘Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’s sitting in your dad’s flat.’

‘That’s whose voice you heard?’

Saleem nodded. ‘That’s him. He mustn’t know I’m here and he can’t see me talking to you.’

‘Does he know I’m a police officer?’

The boy shrugged. ‘Don’t know. I ain’t said anything. Does it matter?’

‘God knows what my dad’s told him, but I think Starkey might have got the idea I’ve been in jail.’

Saleem’s laugh sounded more natural now and he was smiling when he turned round. ‘Who’s going to believe that?’

‘Where were you when your cousin Mohammad was killed?’

Saleem’s face dropped. ‘I just got told the game was on, some sort of shakedown. I was hanging around the rec and some white guys I knew said I could earn a bit of cash, if I wanted to help. They sent me down Attlee Avenue. I had to keep a lookout and make sure no one got out down there. I didn’t even know who they were chasing. I walked down to the bottom corner, then I walked back up, didn’t see nothing.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Just some lads. There was some money in it. Seemed like easy money.’

‘Who stabbed him?’

‘Don’t know. I stopped to roll a ciggy. Honest, I didn’t even know who the target was until …’ His voice caught in his throat and he turned back to the view of the ring road, hiding his face from Sean. ‘I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Mo. He was my cousin. He stuck up for Ghazala.’ Saleem sucked his teeth and spat over the wall of the block. ‘They must be laughing at me now, those boys. Same ones who came to burn down the shop, I reckon.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Because they’re racists, of course. You want a name? There’s an older guy called Gary MacDonald, fat and bald. You can see videos of him on the internet doing all the Nazi salutes at a football match.’

‘So that’s what this is about, is it? Far-right extremists? What about the drugs?’

‘What about them?’

‘Terry Starkey reckons drugs are coming in to the estate from the Asian community.’

‘Of course he’d say that. Come on, you’re supposed to be the clever one. You work it out. I’ve got to go. We’re staying at my auntie’s and I’m supposed to be tucked up on the settee, letting my stitches heal. My sister will kill me if she knows I’ve been here.’

Despite his wound, Saleem moved quickly and reached the exit door in three strides. He swung himself round onto the ladder, wincing only slightly from the injury. Sean thought how in another world, the boy could have been a gymnast.

‘Wait! You can call me if you think of anything else,’ Sean said. But Saleem had gone and the metal door clanged shut at the foot of the ladder.

Sean made his way back down the stairs. When he reached the first floor, it was as if the boy had never been there. He pushed open the door to the landing and stopped dead. Terry Starkey was standing by the lift with Sean’s copy of The Doncaster Free Press in his hand.

‘Did you drop this?’ Terry said.

Sean nodded. ‘Must have done.’ He tried to think quickly, thoughts scrambling round his brain. ‘Look, um, I’m sorry for your loss. Must be hard to know she’s out. The one who did it.’

Starkey’s face was expressionless, the bright blue eyes fixed on Sean’s. ‘Yeah, thanks, it is. I was looking for you as it goes. The old man didn’t know when you would be back.’

‘Just got in. Been for a wander round.’ He watched for a reaction but got nothing back. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I thought we should get to know each other a bit, we’ve got a lot in common.’

‘Really?’

‘More than you’d imagine,’ Starkey’s laugh hit the metal door of the lift and bounced back off the concrete wall behind them. ‘Jack said you might be able to help me.’

Sean’s mouth was so dry he thought his tongue would stick to the roof.

‘I’ve got myself one of these new smartphones,’ Terry continued. ‘Your dad was trying to help me set something up, but he hadn’t got a clue. No offence, mate. Me mam’s the same, out of the bloody ark, technophobic. We’re two of a kind, aren’t we?’

Sean forced a smile; it felt like a snake slithering across his face where his mouth used to be.

‘I can have a go,’ he said.

‘It’s that Twitter I want to get on to, for the CUC campaign.’

‘Oh. There’s always the library.’

‘No, don’t fancy that, too public. See what you can do with this. No idea how to do half the stuff on it beyond phoning and texting.’

He held out a phone. Sean took it. It was a very recent model. He turned it over in his hand and noticed a set of tiny lines scored into the gloss black. Not brand new, then.

‘Nice phone. Shall we go back in? We might as will sit down while we’re sorting it out.’ Sean knocked and his father opened the door immediately, as if he’d been listening.

He had an idea that he might be able do something clever with Starkey’s phone while he was installing Twitter, but he didn’t really know what he should be looking for. The recent calls list might give him some names or numbers, but probably nothing that would mean anything. Added to which, Starkey was watching him with those blue eyes, hungry to learn how the phone worked.