‘It’s nothing. I’ve had worse,’ she said.
He felt so damned cheated. He thought he had a sister. Like coming up on the lottery only to lose your winning ticket. He desperately wanted to hate her also, but his capacity for hate was being spread a little too thin these days.
‘Whatever,’ he said, resting back against the wall and closing his eyes again.
40
He stared hard at the piece of paper. On it was simply an address scrawled in blue pen. His own handwriting had gotten weaker, more spidery, he thought. Was that a sign of something? A sign of old age? What? Or was it foolish to read something so significant into a series of loose and florid lines on a torn-off page from a notebook? It had become less definite, that was sure, like him. Less definite about things. There was a time once when he knew what he knew and didn’t question things as readily; nowadays everything was there to be queried. Again, was that just maturity kicking in at some point, or the older mind struggling to comprehend? Needing answers. Well he needed one now like never before.
Four months, that’s all he had left. After four months he could close the door on all this and set off into the sunset in his brand new camper van. He didn’t need to be bothered with it anymore. So why was he getting so worked up? Because the force he knew and loved (after a fashion — all love is painful at times) was rotten, that’s why. When it had become so he didn’t rightly know, had never even suspected it was beginning to stink of decay. OK, so it was never perfect, always one or two bad apples to remove from the barrel, always something that happened that pulled the lid on dodgy practices, but this? This went even deeper, like a cancer that had infiltrated it so thoroughly he doubted you could ever get it clean again.
He felt totally crushed by Styles’ revelations. Dismayed to the point of depression. So what? He could easily wash his hands of it, leave them to sort it out amongst themselves, slink off to keep a low profile. After all, look what happened to Wood and Baxter. This Doradus bunch didn’t mess around. But it wasn’t as simple as that. They’d dirtied the thing he admired. He didn’t want to let it go, like Styles had insisted; to lie low and leave it up to him. He was a good police officer, and everything about this was so wrong it was rancid. That cut across the grain of decades of police work. He wanted to have a part in getting it clean again. He wanted to get even, especially with Superintendent Maloney. He bluntly told Styles that he wouldn’t rest until Maloney was behind bars, in spite of Styles’ protests. He’d do his best to crack this case and put Maloney’s head on a platter, and if that meant treading all over MI-bloody-5’s softly-softly approach then so be it. He still had four months left and he was going to use it to good effect. What was the worst thing they could do? Sack him?
Stafford looked at the piece of paper again. He went to the office door and called Styles into his office.
‘Close the door,’ he said and wagged a finger for Styles to come over to his desk. ‘I received a tip-off this morning.’
‘About?’
‘About the murdered Polish woman. It seems a man was seen running away from the flat on the night of the murder, chased by another guy.’
‘Where’d the tip-off come from?’
He waved the paper. ‘An old acquaintance of mine, one Robert Courtney. He’s been down for a number of offences in the past, mainly stealing cars and the like. Nothing major. He’s been going straight, so he says, but has now got a wife and kids to feed. Makes a little extra by feeding me information every now and again. Still has his contacts on the streets. Any light we could shed on this case could help bring Maloney down,’ he added.
‘OK, give it here, I’ll see what we can do,’ said Styles.
‘Bugger that!’ he said. ‘This is still my baby.’
‘You don’t want to do this, Stafford,’ said Styles. ‘Leave it up to us.’ He held his hand out for the paper.
‘Like hell I don’t,’ he said. He pocketed the paper.
‘You really don’t have to get involved any further.’
‘Maybe I do. For my own good.’
Styles looked down at his feet. ‘OK, bring the man in. We’ll both see him.’
He shook his head. ‘Not that simple. He wants me to go to him. We arranged to meet in the Collyhurst area an hour from now.’ He checked his watch: 8pm.
‘Can you trust him?’
‘Getting as you don’t know who you can trust these days,’ he said, and for some reason Charles Rayne’s anxious face and his delivering of his whispered warning sprang disconcertingly to his mind. He shrugged it away.
‘You’ve got to take me along with you then,’ he insisted.
‘But it’s my shout. Let me run things,’ he said. Styles shrugged his assent. ‘Gareth Davies has also gone missing.’
‘Forget him, his alibis stack up.’
‘No, I can’t; somehow the man is involved in all this. I just don’t know how yet. If he’s guilty in some way I want his arse for shoes. If he’s innocent he may just well be in deep trouble and he’ll need my help.’
The car pulled up near a railway viaduct just as a commuter train rumbled across, the lights from its windows flashing down on them as the carriages whipped by. They got out of the car.
‘Why here?’ asked Styles.
They were standing on the edge of waste ground where houses had been demolished. Across from them were empty, derelict Victorian terraced housing, evidence that this had once been a busy and popular area. It had gone downhill fast. There was never enough money, even with the massive amounts spent on regeneration projects in Manchester. Some areas were being raised up, given new life, but some pockets, like here, were slowly sinking into crime and poverty, the recession feeding off these places like a ravenous hound.
‘Because it’s far enough out of the way not to be seen,’ explained Stafford. ‘He’d get short thrift if he were seen talking to me.’ He leant over into the car and took out a torch. Street lighting here was in dreadfully short supply. ‘This way,’ he directed. They picked their way over a rubble-strewn landscape to the row of empty houses, most of the windows boarded up, walls defaced by graffiti. ‘It’s this house on the corner,’ he said.
They glanced around but the place was deserted. Styles pushed at the old door to the house and it swung stiffly open. ‘Wipe your feet,’ he said, grinning widely as he stepped inside, his shoes crunching noisily on broken glass.
Stafford followed, shining the torch into the pitch-black living room, once home to hard-pressed working-class families who worked in the factories, nowadays not even a ghost of a home. ‘Courtney!’ he said. ‘Cut the games. Where the fuck are you?’ His voice came back at him, hollow and otherworldly. ‘Watch out for the holes in the floorboards, Styles,’ he warned, playing the torch beam over the floor.
Stafford narrowed his eyes. ‘You smell something?’ he asked, sniffing the air.
Styles stepped closer. ‘I smell piss,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been using it as a doss house.’
‘I think it’s gas.’
‘Yeah, maybe, faintly,’ said Styles. ‘Residue from a severed gas pipe, no doubt. The place looks empty, sir. This Courtney man’s playing games with you.’
‘Not his style,’ said Stafford.
They passed the stairs that divided the house up the middle, as it was in a lot of two-up, two-down terraced housing, and moved slowly into the kitchen area, shining the torch into the gloom. The windows were blacked out, with boards nailed on the outside.
‘Empty,’ said Stafford. ‘What’s that man playing at?’
Styles froze and lifted his head. ‘You hear that?’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘There’s someone upstairs, sir.’ He shone the torch back to the stairwell and made a move as if to investigate.
‘Leave this to me,’ he said. ‘Courtney’s twitchy at the best of times. He’ll freak on seeing you.’