Dean looked slightly pissed off. This was her story, after all. ‘And so it went on. Even after she left school and started working at the petrol station on Skenby Road. She had no life of her own. Eric saw to that.’ She gave Paula a shrewd look. ‘It’s what your Tony Hill would say. People become complicit in their own victimhood.’
‘You know a lot about Kerry Fletcher.’
Dean gave her a wary glance. ‘I make it my business to know as much as I can about all of them. A cup of coffee and a motherly attitude goes a very long way on the shit side of the street, Paula.’
‘So what happened?’
‘The mother died. About four months ago, as far as I can make out. It took a few weeks for it to dawn on Kerry that she was free at last.’
‘So she went on the streets? What happened to the job at the garage?’
‘When the scales fell from Kerry’s eyes, they made a right clatter on the pavement. She didn’t just want to be free, she wanted to rub Eric Fletcher’s nose in it. He wasn’t getting her for free any more, and she was making other men pay for what had been his.’
Paula whistled. ‘And how did Eric take that?’
‘Not well,’ Dean said drily. ‘He kept turning up where she was working and begging her to come home. Kerry refused point-blank. She said it was safer on the streets than in his house. We warned him off a couple of times, he was making a scene in the street and it was shaping up to turn nasty. Since then, he’s kept a low profile, as far as I’m aware.’
‘She said it was safer on the streets than in his house,’ Paula repeated. ‘That sounds like the perfect fit for what Tony was talking about. And he must have used her email address. Of course he did.’ Energised now, she was tapping on the computer keys, composing an urgent message to Stacey to look for an Eric Fletcher in the Skenby flats, probably the sixteenth floor.
As she sent it, she noticed a message had arrived from Dr Grisha Shatalov. ‘Bear with me a second,’ she said, momentarily abstracted. Paula, it read, We’ve got a torn piece of fingernail embedded in the exposed flesh of the latest body. It doesn’t match the victim’s fingers. It’s almost certainly that of the killer and we should be able to get DNA – enough certainly for identification via STR and Mitochondrial DNA. Hope that cheers up your Saturday night. Give my condolences to Carol if you see her before I do. Dr Grisha.
Sometimes a case reached a point that was like turning a key in a complicated lock. One tumbler would fall, then another, then it felt like an inevitable matching of pins and key, and the door would swing open. Here, now, late on a Saturday evening, Paula knew it was only a matter of time before MIT would be able to point to their last case with pride in the result. Carol could walk out with her head high, knowing she’d created something, whereas Blake could only destroy.
It would be a moment to relish.
Ambrose’s voice had risen to a bellow. ‘She’s what? Who the fuck told Jordan where Vance is hiding?’
‘Stacey, of course,’ Tony said, sounding far more patient and reasonable than he felt.
‘What the fuck was she thinking? That’s operational information.’
‘And Carol Jordan is her boss, not you. She turned her expertise to this problem for Carol, not for you. You shouldn’t be surprised that she is loyal to the person who gave her the chance to shine.’
‘You need to stop Jordan,’ Ambrose said, his voice hard and rough. ‘I don’t want her blundering into this. He’s too dangerous to confront single-handed. You need to stop her before something terrible happens.’
‘That’s exactly why I’m hammering up the motorway right now,’ Tony said, keeping his tone level to try and take the heat out of the situation. ‘When are you leaving?’
‘Within the next five minutes. When did she take off?’
‘Stacey spoke to her directly after she spoke to you. And then she spoke to me. And I left about fifteen minutes ago.’
‘Fuck. This is a nightmare.’
‘There’s one thing you could do,’ Tony said, moving over into the fast lane.
‘What?’
‘You could call Franklin and ask him to intercept her.’
Ambrose snorted. ‘That’s your idea of a solution? We’ll end up with a Mexican stand-off between Jordan and Franklin while Vance hightails it out the back door, over the hills and far away.’
‘Please yourself,’ Tony snapped. ‘I’m just trying to save her life, that’s all.’ He ended the call and coaxed another five miles an hour out of his protesting engine. ‘Oh, Carol,’ he groaned. ‘Please don’t do anything brave. Or noble. Just sit tight. Please.’
Sam Evans had never lost his appetite for getting out on the street and talking to people. He didn’t have Paula’s skills in the interview room, but he was good at drawing people into conversation then sussing out when to charm and when to lean. He could slip straight back into his working-class accent, and that helped when you were dealing with people at the bottom of the heap. Sam opened his mouth and they imagined someone who wasn’t condescending or judging.
When Paula had passed on the background she’d got from the sergeant in Vice, the obvious next step had been to find Kerry Fletcher and bring her in, out of harm’s way. Paula needed to stay in the office, pulling together any information that might give them a lead on where to find Eric Fletcher. Meanwhile, Sam would do his best to find Fletcher’s daughter.
Temple Fields on a Saturday night was thronged with people. Drag queens, beautiful boys, striking baby dykes with their tattoos and piercings, and Lady Gaga wannabes were the eye candy, but there were plenty of more conventional-looking people out for a good time in the gay bars and restaurants that lined the streets. The area had shifted from hardcore red-light zone to gay village back in the nineties, but the new century had made it more eclectic, with the hippest of the straight young people happy to hang out in what they perceived as the cool clubs and bars. Now, it was a heaving mix, an anything-goes part of town. And there was still a thriving kerbside sex trade, if you knew where to look.
Sam weaved his way through the crowds, alert for female and male prostitutes. Sometimes they saw him coming, smelled ‘cop’ on him and melted away into the anonymous crowds before he could speak to them. But he’d managed to talk to half a dozen of the women. A couple of them had completely blanked him, refusing to engage in conversation at all. Sam suspected they knew their pimps were watching.
Two of the others denied any knowledge of Kerry Fletcher. A fifth said she knew Kerry though she hadn’t seen her for a day or two, but that was probably because Kerry usually worked Campion Way, not the main drag. So Sam had moved down towards the boulevard that separated Temple Fields from the rest of the city centre. There he’d found a more informative source.
The woman was leaning against the wall in the mouth of an alley, smoking and sipping on a coffee. ‘Christ, can’t I have ten fucking minutes to myself?’ she said as Sam approached. ‘I don’t give freebies to the Bill.’
‘I’m looking for Kerry Fletcher,’ Sam said.
‘You’re not the only one,’ the woman said sourly. ‘I’ve not seen her tonight, but her old man was round looking for her last night.’
‘I thought he’d been warned off?’
‘Maybe so. He’s turned the volume down, that’s for sure. But he still hangs around, watching her every move. She turned on him last night, though. Told him to fuck right off.’
‘How did he take that?’
‘He didn’t have much choice, she went off with a punter.’
‘So what was he saying to her to wind her up?’
‘I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. I was trying to earn a fucking living. He was going on at her about how it’s not safe on the streets. That somebody’s killing whores like us and she should come home. She said she’d rather take her chances out on the street than with him. And he said he’d do anything she wanted if she’d just give up selling herself on the streets. And she said, “I just want you to stop this. Now fuck off.” Then she walked away and got in this bloke’s car.’