Case One (7 page)

“You didn't tell Staff?” Holly asked.

Sam shook his head and put on a whiny little-boy voice: “
Sarge, it was me, Sarge, not him, Sarge.
”

Holly nodded. “Yeah, that wouldn't've been good.” Sergeant Stafford wasn't exactly fond of people who complained. The way he saw it,
life
was unfair and if you couldn't deal with the small stuff you wouldn't be much use when the big stuff came along.

“So what are you going to do?”

“Nothing,” Sam said grimly. “Except make sure that next time
I
call it in. Sod Mulvey.”

He skewered a chip with his fork and bit it decisively. As he did so Holly's phone rang. She looked at the screen:
Mum
.

For a second she debated, then pressed a button. “Hi.”

“Hi. It's me,” her mum said.

“Hold on a sec.”

Holly stood up and gestured to their plates. “Will you clear this up?”

Sam nodded. “You finished?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He started moving the last of her chips to his own plate and Holly headed off towards her room. “Hi,” she said into the phone again. “Sorry.”

“It's not too late for you is it?” her mum said.

“No, it's okay. I'm on earlies tomorrow though, so I'm heading for bed in a few minutes.” She let herself into her room and closed the door behind her.

“Who's there with you?”

“Just Sam.” Then she added: “Yvonne's upstairs.” Her mum had liked Yvonne when they met and Holly knew she worried less if she thought Yvonne was around.

“Oh. Good,” her mum said.

“How's things at home?” Holly asked, sitting on the bed and unlacing her boots with one hand.

“Oh, you know – okay.”

Holly paused and assessed her mother's tone, trying to work out how okay “okay” really was.

“No…
problems
?” They both knew what the euphemism referred to and although she always felt obliged to ask, it was times like this – when she was tired and just wanted to get to bed – that Holly hoped it wouldn't be the start of a much longer, more emotional conversation.

“No, no, everything's fine,” her mum said. “What sort of day have you had?”

Holly relaxed a little at that and pushed her boots off. “It was all right. Nothing much. We had an RTC – Road Traffic Collision.”

“Oh dear. Was anyone hurt?”

“No, it was fine,” Holly said. “Nothing major.”

In her head she saw the image of Ashleigh Jarvis lying in the road with no shoes on her feet, the probable victim of an accident and a rape.

“Listen,” she said. “Can I call you tomorrow? I need to get to bed. Is that okay?”

“Of course, sweetie. Just as long as you're all right.”

“I am,” Holly said. “I'm fine.”

SATURDAY

1.

MORNINGSTAR RD STATION
07:34 HRS

It was only just getting light as Holly turned the corner into Morningstar Road. She had her hands pushed deep into her coat pockets and her hat was pulled down over her ears against the icy breeze.

“Hol?”

The call came from behind her. When she turned to look she saw Sam jogging after her, his breath coming in clouds. Although he had a scarf wrapped round his neck he seemed too lightly dressed for the cold morning.

Holly waited till he was alongside her then carried on towards the station.

“Aren't you frozen?” she asked.

“Nope. Got my thermals on.”

“Too much information, 'specially this early.”

Sam chuckled. “Did you see Yvonne this morning?” he asked then.

“Uh-uh. Why?”

“Just wondered if they'd got any further last night – you know, on the rape case.”

Holly nodded. She'd been wondering the same thing more or less from the moment she'd got out of bed.

“Suppose it'll depend if the victim came round and told them what happened,” Sam went on. “We'll probably be off it anyway though. I haven't done the same thing two days running since we got here.”

“No, me either,” Holly said flatly.

The frontage of Morningstar Road station was red-brick Victorian, with tall windows which emitted a sickly yellow light. However, behind the original structure, a larger and more modern building had been erected on the site of demolished houses and shops. This was where the majority of the station's work was done, and there was no public access to the car park and Custody Yard which surrounded it.

At the rear gate Holly swiped her security card through the reader and when the lock clicked she held the gate open for Sam to follow. Under the gaze of several security cameras they crossed to the main building and entered the nick through heavy glass doors.

Inside it was warmer and the station corridors were getting busy with late-turn officers who'd come in to finish off reports before the end of their overnight shift. A lot of them looked tired and hassled. Unless you were on authorised overtime you wanted to get your paperwork done before the eight o'clock changeover so you could clock off on time and get home to bed.

Leaving Sam in the corridor, Holly entered the female locker room where it was quieter and smelled of an odd mixture of perfume and cleaning fluid. Her uniform and personal effects were housed in a dented metal locker near the showers and, after dialling the combination, she pulled out her gear and started to change.

On the whole there was a relaxed and fairly friendly atmosphere in the locker room, but even so, Holly still didn't feel she knew the regs well enough to enter into much of the gossip and chit-chat that went on around her. You didn't have to be in there for very long to realise that the female PCs could be every bit as raunchy and tasteless as the men, but Holly also knew that some of the women tended to moderate what they said when she was around – in particular about sex and booze. Whether that was because they were being protective or because they weren't sure how she'd take it, Holly couldn't tell.

Once she'd pulled on her uniform sweater Holly set about tying her hair back in a ponytail. As she did so she caught part of a conversation between two unseen women in a row of lockers on the far side of the room.

“So how old was she?”

“Fourteen? Something like that.”

“Well, old enough round there then.”

“Nah, come on…”

“No, I'm not saying she wanted it. I'm just saying if you'd got any sense you wouldn't be wandering round the Kaddy Estate on your own in the dark. I mean, that
is
asking for it. You need more sense than…”

Holly lost the rest of the conversation in the clang of a locker being closed and a sudden influx of noise from the corridor as the women went out. She finished tying her hair and closed her own locker.

Would the other PCs have thought differently if they'd seen Ashleigh Jarvis lying in the road? Probably not. Did it matter? Again, probably not. Holly knew that everyone here would tell you the same thing: don't get emotionally involved, stay objective. It was the only way to deal with the job.

She finished tying her hair and closed her own locker, quietly.

As he pushed against the door into the canteen Sam almost walked into PC Bob Mulvey.

“Whoa there, tiger!” Mulvey said like he was the first one to ever use the phrase.

“Right,” Sam said. He made to move on but Mulvey continued to block the door. “Where's your girlfriend?” he asked, looking along the corridor.

Sam knew he meant Holly – yet another lame joke – but he didn't want to give Mulvey the satisfaction of acknowledging it.

“Still in bed, probably,” he said.

Mulvey frowned. “She should be in by now.”

“In?” Sam looked puzzled. “Why?”

“I thought she was on this morning. Sergeant Stafford reckons she is.”

“Why'd he think that?” Sam said. “He doesn't know her.”

“What? What're you talking about?”

“Lucy,” Sam said, plucking a name from the air.

“Who the bloody hell's Lucy?” Mulvey said, his irritation showing now.

“My girlfriend,” Sam said, poker-faced. “I thought you said—”

Mulvey scowled at him. “You taking the piss?”

“What? No,” Sam said, feigning genuine confusion. “You said ‘Where's your girlfriend?' and—”

“I meant
Holly
,” Mulvey said, cutting him off.

“What's up?” Holly asked as she approached along the corridor, just in time to hear her name.

Mulvey turned quickly, as if he suspected he was the victim of an elaborate set-up, but when Holly just looked curious the PC was stymied.

“Sergeant Stafford wants you both to report to the Incident Room,” he said tersely. “There's a briefing at eight.”

“What sort of briefing?” Holly said.

“The Jarvis case,” Mulvey said, and Sam was pleased to hear a note of resentment in his voice. “Looks like you'll be on door-to-door.”

“Excellent,” Sam said, and meant it.

“Don't be late,” Mulvey told him and moved off. Behind his back Sam gave a broad smirk.

“What?” Holly asked.

“No, nothing,” Sam said, still grinning as he watched the PC depart. “I just found out how bright Mulvey is, that's all.”

2.

INCIDENT ROOM
MORNINGSTAR RD STATION
08:03 HRS

“For those of you who don't know already, the victim is Ashleigh Jane Jarvis, an IC1 female, fourteen years old.”

DS Woods was standing in front of a whiteboard in the Incident Room. On a desk nearby was a laptop, which was linked up for the PowerPoint presentation. It was operated by DC Danny Simmons, a guy in his late twenties wearing a leather jacket, jeans and DMs.

When Woods nodded, Simmons tapped a key on the laptop and a school photo of Ashleigh was projected onto the whiteboard. The six uniformed officers in the room each had a copy of the same photo and, like them, Holly and Sam had their pocketbooks open, ready to make notes.

“As of 07:30 this morning Ashleigh's condition was still listed as critical but stable,” Woods went on. “Which means that she's unconscious and can't tell us what happened to her. However, from the forensics we do know that she'd had intercourse recently, and because some of her clothes were found in a bin shelter on the Cadogan Estate we're taking the view that it wasn't consensual sex. We might be wrong, but we can't afford to take the chance, so we're treating this as a rape, okay?”

There were nods from the officers and Holly noticed there were none of the usual dodgy remarks that often accompanied parade briefings.

“Okay,” Woods said. “Our timeline starts at 18:05 last night when Ashleigh left her friend's house saying she was going home. At 18:40 she sent a text to her mother to say she'd be home soon, and at 19:05 she was involved in the RTC on Gatemead Road. If she'd just been attacked I don't think she'd have been sending texts, so I think it's most likely that the assault took place between 18:40 and 19:05.”

Danny Simmons changed the display and a map of the Cadogan Estate and surrounding streets came up on the whiteboard. Woods blew his nose into a tissue and stepped forward to indicate the locations he was talking about.

“Ashleigh's bag and clothes were found here, so that's a possible site for the attack. The RTC happened here – a distance of about three hundred metres. Now, the bin shelter isn't on a direct route through the estate, so there's a possibility that Ashleigh was taken there by force, or alternatively that she was led there by someone she knew. Whichever it was, we need to know if anyone saw her – either alone or with someone else – in this area between 18:00 and 19:00 hours.

“We'll be doing a door-to-door on the properties along her probable route and we'll also be manning the cordon round the bin shelter and talking to anyone who passes it. Did they see her? Was there anyone acting suspiciously in the area – running away, sitting in a vehicle, kerb crawling…?”

From the front row of chairs, Oz Sitwell looked up from his notes. “Are we going to get DNA from the rape kit?”

Woods nodded. “It looks likely. There was semen present, so either he's stupid or he doesn't care.”

Another reg spoke up from the side. “Have we got any known paedos in the area, Sarge? I'm thinking about her age. Could she have been a target because she was young?”

Woods reached for another tissue and nodded. “We're checking known sexual offenders on the Register, but at the moment nothing's come up. Age could be a factor, but for the time being I want to keep an open mind.”

He sniffed, rubbed his nose and looked round. “Any other questions?”

There weren't.

“Right. As far as members of the public are concerned, remember it's the Cadogan, so half the estate probably know what went on – or think they do. Even so, the line is that we're investigating a serious assault and beyond that, no specifics. For the moment I want to keep the rape aspect to ourselves.”

He glanced down at a piece of paper. “Okay – assignments: PC Ellis, PC Lester and TPO Blades are with Danny on the cordon, everyone else on the door-to-door. We're on channel three for radios and there'll be a van at the scene, so that's our command point. We'll leave in five from the yard.”

He blew his nose noisily and at that signal there was a scraping of chairs and a rise in the chatter as the assembled officers got to their feet. As Sam and Holly put their pocketbooks away Oz Sitwell came over.

“Sam, you're with me on door-to-door. Grab your jacket, you'll need it.”

“Right.” Sam moved off, looking pleased.

“You too, Hol,” Oz said.

Holly nodded but gestured to the room, uncertain. “Who am I paired with?”

“No one. You're OR.”

OR stood for
Own Recognisance
and it meant she'd be working without the direct supervision of a training officer. So far this had only happened when she'd been assigned to tasks inside the station – things that didn't have implications for a serious ongoing enquiry.