‘Good. Do you know Rafaello’s? It’s just off the Woolmarket.’
‘I’ve seen it, yes.’
‘I’ll book a table. Nine thirty, unless you hear from me.’
‘See you then.’ Paula ended the call. She felt five years lighter, the weight of her recent past slipping from her. Restoration, that’s what it felt like. Being restored to a person for whom a relationship was a possibility. She turned back, enjoying the look of shock on Sam Evans’s face when he saw her transformed from leadenness to buoyancy. Oh, but it was going to be a fine evening.
Meanwhile, there was the small matter of the Brucehill boys to deal with. The way she felt now, they better watch out.
It had taken all Alvin Ambrose’s powers of persuasion for Patterson to assign him to the Manchester trawl. The DCI thought this was donkey work for the lowly, but Ambrose wanted to be there with his hand on whatever transpired. He’d pointed out that a good lead would be something for him to follow up on anyway, so he might as well be one of the bodies already on the ground. ‘It’s less than a hundred miles,’ he’d said. ‘If something breaks down here, I can be back on the motorway, blues and twos, in not much more than an hour.’ Finally, Patterson had given in.
Now he was in the thick of it, Ambrose was less than excited about his assignment. But that was OK. He didn’t have a problem with the fact that so much police work was pure drudgery. He’d arrived in Manchester with a list of fifty-three vehicles registered locally that had been in Worcester on the day of Jennifer Maidment’s murder and abduction. DCI Andy Millwood had been welcoming, setting him up with a desk in the main Serious Crimes Unit. He’d given Ambrose a CID aide - a uniformed officer on assignment to the plain clothes branch to see if the work suited her - who would drive Ambrose round the unfamiliar territory and sit in on his interviews. Millwood made it sound like he was offering unparalleled assistance, but Ambrose knew the rookie was the lowest form of life available to be loaned out. And that she was there as much to keep an eye on the out-of-town guy as to help him. Still, it was a lot better than nothing.
‘We think our perp’s job is something to do with computers or ICT,’ Ambrose said. ‘But that’s a suggestion, not a definite, so we want to keep an open mind on that one. What we’re looking for is an alibi for the time they were in Worcester. What they did. Where they went. Who they were with.’
‘OK, skip,’ the aide said. She was a short block of a woman with legs like cricket stumps, her plain face redeemed by a luxuriant shock of blue-black hair and luminous dark blue eyes. Ambrose felt she was wary of him. He wasn’t sure whether that was because he was an outsider or because of the colour of his skin. ‘It’s quite a compact area. Mostly Victorian terraces and big semis, a lot of them turned into student flats.’
‘Let’s make a start, then.’
Four hours in, they’d followed up ten leads and run the gauntlet of middle-class citizens who knew their rights and wanted to deliver a lecture on how the government was eroding civil liberties. It was a common theme right across the age spectrum, from students to legal aid lawyers. Ambrose, accustomed to a smaller city whose political ghettos ran to single streets rather than whole suburbs, felt stunned by the onslaught.
But once they’d expressed their trenchant views, it turned out that these were also the law-abiding types. Eight had given chapter and verse on where they’d been and who they’d met, information that could easily be checked by a phone call or a visit by the troops back in Worcester. One had only come off the motorway to try the food at a newly refurbished gastro-pub. He had a timed receipt from the pub, and another from a petrol station on the outskirts of Taunton which seemed to make it clear he couldn’t have killed Jennifer. The tenth had set Ambrose’s antennae twitching, but the longer they talked to him, the clearer it became that the reasons were nothing to do with murder. The guy, a market trader, was obviously hiding something. But not what they were after. As they walked away, the aide scampering to keep up, Ambrose said, ‘You might want to get the local boys to turn over his lock-up. I bet they find it stacked to the rafters with pirate DVDs, counterfeit perfumes and fake watches.’
Six other vehicle owners hadn’t been home. They’d stopped at a café for lunch when Patterson rang with the gobsmacking news that Jennifer’s murder was now officially tied in to three others in Bradfield, thanks to that clever bugger Tony Hill. Even more surprising was that the victims were male. Now they had three other abduction dates to use as disqualifying alibis for their potential suspects. Ambrose ended the call and gave a grim smile. ‘We’ve just been upgraded.’
‘How do you mean?’ she said through a mouthful of steak pie.
‘This is now officially a serial-killer investigation,’ Ambrose said. He pushed his plate of fish fingers and chips away. His appetite had disappeared with Patterson’s news. Jennifer’s death had been hard enough to bear. But add three other teenagers to the mix and the weight pressed down like a physical encumbrance. When he worked murders, Ambrose always got to the end of the day feeling like he’d literally been carrying an extra burden around. His muscles ached and his joints felt stiff, as if his body was taking on the psychological load. Tonight, he knew he’d lower himself gingerly into bed, hurting like he’d gone half a dozen rounds in the ring. ‘We need to get back on the job,’ he said, nodding at the aide’s half-eaten food. ‘Five minutes. I’ll see you back at the car.’
They dealt with the next two hits swiftly enough. The first, a computer salesman, seemed promising. But they soon realised he knew next to nothing about the details of what went on inside what he sold. And he’d been on a three-day break to Prague with his wife which covered the abduction and murder of Daniel Morrison. The next was a woman whose entire time in Worcester was accounted for by meetings with the cathedral clergy to discuss designs for new vestments.
And then they arrived at the address where Warren Davy’s Toyota Verso was registered.
CHAPTER 33
It wasn’t a house or an office. It was a back-street garage tucked away at the end of a cul-de-sac which was also home to a craft bakery and a vegan café. Even though it was Sunday, a compact, muscular man with blond cropped hair and oil-stained overalls was respraying the wing of an elderly Ford Fiesta. He didn’t stop what he was doing till the unmarked car came to a halt a few feet from him. Then he turned off his spray gun and gave them a challenging look. ‘What is it, then? A hit and run?’
‘Are you Warren Davy?’ Ambrose asked.
The man tilted his head back and laughed. ‘That’s a good one. No, mate. I’m not Warren. What do you want with him?’
‘That’s between us and Mr Davy,’ Ambrose said. ‘And you are?’
‘I’m Bill Carr.’ A smile lit up his blunt features. ‘Carr by name, car by trade. Get it?’
‘And what’s your connection to Warren Davy?’
‘Who says there’s a connection?’
‘DVLA. Warren Davy’s Toyota Verso is registered to this address.’
Carr’s face cleared. ‘Right. Now I get it. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but you won’t find Warren here.’
‘You’re going to have to give me a bit more than that,’ Ambrose said. ‘We’re here on a serious matter. It’s not the sort of thing where you want to be caught out obstructing the police, believe me.’
Carr looked startled. ‘OK, OK.’ He put the spray gun down and stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. I’m his cousin. Warren uses this place as an address for deliveries and stuff. That’s all.’