Next to Die (12 page)
‘Can I ask something?’ Monica said. Her voice seemed hesitant.
‘Yes, anything,’ Joe said.
‘I don’t mean to be rude, and I’m sorry if you think I am, but, well,’ and she smiled nervously, ‘I like you and I think I can talk to you.’
Joe returned the smile. ‘Just say it. You won’t offend me.’
‘You’ve been quiet ever since we left court. I just thought you’d be happier, because you did your job well. You got Ronnie out of prison when most people wouldn’t. Is it because he’s accused of murder so you worry you’ve done the wrong thing? I need to know how I’ll be able to cope with things like that, helping people who’ve done bad things.’
Joe was surprised. He hadn’t realised he had seemed distant, although he had been brooding. The stranger at the back of court had unnerved him, the same person who had been outside his office the day before. It meant there were things happening that felt out of his control. He didn’t like that.
But he didn’t want to share any of that with Monica.
‘It’s a responsibility,’ Joe said. ‘There are no guarantees when he leaves prison. He has promised to turn up for his trial and keep out of trouble, but empty promises are easily made.’
He was saved from any further discussion by a noise, a creak of hinges. A small grey door opened, next to the large steel ones where the white prison vans drove in. A guard looked out first, a bald head and bright white shirt, and then Ronnie stepped into freedom.
Ronnie blinked and shielded his eyes at first. He looked around, shocked, as if he hadn’t expected his day to turn out like that. When he saw Joe he waved, although it seemed hesitant.
As he got closer, Joe said, ‘How are you feeling?’
Ronnie took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know. Pleased to be out of there, I suppose, but it’s not over yet.’
‘So you need to do whatever I say,’ Joe replied. ‘If the trial goes badly, you’ll be back in there, except this time with no privileges.’
‘I want a drink.’
‘You’ve time for that later.’
‘No, now, just one,’ Ronnie said. ‘I’ve had a rough night. I deserve one.’
Joe sighed. He needed to speak to Ronnie anyway. Getting clients in for their appointments was one of the many challenges the job created, because they lived chaotic lives and didn’t go by a normal clock. Every day was just another hard slog to get through, and so a meeting a week later was often nothing more than a niggle that they knew they had somewhere to go that day. He hoped it would be different with Ronnie, but he wanted to avoid the possibility.
‘All right,’ Joe said, ‘but then straight to your mother’s afterwards.’
‘Is she in there?’ Ronnie said, nodding towards the car.
‘She’s the key to your freedom,’ Joe said. ‘If she hadn’t turned up today, you wouldn’t have got out.’
Winnie put her face to the car window. There was no gesture from Ronnie, no smile or wave. He walked round to the other side and climbed in alongside her. She turned to say hello but Ronnie just mumbled in reply. When Joe climbed in, he looked into his mirror and said, ‘So where to, Ronnie? Your call.’
‘Can you take me to Marton?’ When Joe agreed, Ronnie said, ‘Good. I’ll tell you when we get there.’
Joe exchanged a curious glance with Monica, but it was Ronnie’s freedom, not his. The least Joe could do was let him choose where to drink his first pint.
Marton was a small town outside of the Manchester ring, one of the last stops before the sprawling moorlands of the Pennines. The journey started as inner city clutter, with adult shops and bargain off-licences, before it opened out into semi-detached suburbia and then the small towns just outside the motorway that looped around Manchester. The journey was quiet, with Ronnie’s mother silent all the way there, and Ronnie either looking out of the window or down at his phone, which had been in his hand ever since they left the prison.
The nearer they got to Marton, the greener it became, with the last part of the journey a long climb lined by low stone walls and trees that grew over the road. The branches clattered against buses and made shadows across the tarmac, and the hilltops were just barren glimpses between the trees.
The mood changed as they drove into the town. The redbrick of Manchester was replaced by the grey stone of the Pennines, where the doorways were smaller and the streets ran much steeper. The sun tried to give it some rustic charm, reflecting brightly against the polished steps on the rows of cottages that fronted up to the road. But up here the winds blew hard, and even on the warmest days a grey cloud always seemed to be nearby, ready to take away the brightness.
Joe checked his mirror to look into the back seat. Ronnie was staring forward, at Monica, suddenly less interested in his surroundings.
‘So where are we having this drink, Ronnie?’ Joe said, as the houses gave way to shops.
Ronnie peered through the windscreen and then pointed. ‘There. The Brittania, near the station.’
Joe followed the gesture and saw a pub on the main street, draped in St George bunting with a couple of bench tables outside. There was a view along the main street, and Joe guessed that the moorland crispness was just enough to take away the traffic fumes. It was Ronnie’s drink though, not Joe’s, and so he found somewhere to pull over. ‘Can you drive?’ he said to Monica.
She looked surprised. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ Joe said. ’Take Mrs Bagley home and then come back here.’
Joe stepped out of the car and was joined on the pavement by Ronnie. As Monica drove his car away, Joe turned to Ronnie and said, ‘You need to know that I’m not going to come running every time you call me.’
‘But you’re preparing my case.’
‘That doesn’t make me your babysitter. I’m the lawyer here, not you, and so what I say goes. If I need you to give me some information, you give it. If I call, you come running. Do we understand each other?’
Ronnie shrugged, his expression sulky.
‘If I’m not there, call Monica Taylor.’
‘Is that her name?’
‘She’s the trainee. She’ll pass everything on, so don’t worry, I’ll be making the decisions, but it will be quicker that way.’
As they walked into the pub Ronnie became more agitated, looking around, swallowing.
‘You look like you really want this drink,’ Joe said.
‘Yes, I do. Can we start preparing now?’
‘Why not,’ Joe said, but then he looked around, his voice a whisper. ‘But wait until we get outside.’
The pub was dark inside, with deep red carpets and paintings screwed to the walls. There was a smell of food in the air, pub fare, and there was a decent lunchtime trade. An old man with a newspaper. A group of workmen in dayglo bibs eating from plates piled high with chips. A woman with dark hair staring quietly into her drink.
Joe ordered the drinks and then followed Ronnie back outside. They settled on the wooden benches, Joe’s orange juice on the table in front of him. He watched as Ronnie took a long, slow sip of his drink, a creamy bitter.
‘So, Ronnie, how was it last night?’
He looked into his drink for a few seconds, and then said, ‘I thought I’d be able to handle it, but…’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘Do you ever think about it, when your clients go to prison?’
Joe thought on how to answer that. The truth was yes, he did, because he took it as a failure, but Joe knew the system wasn’t perfect, not by a long way, but it tried its hardest to work. Prison was part of that game, and once the prison van pulled away, he consoled himself with the thought that justice had taken its course.
‘Yes, all the time,’ Joe said.
‘Until you’ve experienced it, you can’t really know,’ Ronnie said, his eyes down. ‘It’s the noises, echoes. The floors are all so hard, and the walls, so every sound seems to bounce around. You can’t just hide away, because it feels like it’s coming right at you.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I thought I could do it.’
‘So make sure you keep in touch,’ Joe said. ‘If you don’t want to go back there, we need to plan your case properly. And your mother looked pleased to have you back.’
‘That’s a lie and you know it. She’s doing it because you asked.’ Ronnie took another drink. ‘So what now?’
‘You spend tonight with your mother. If I need to speak to you, I’ll call you, so keep that phone charged up. I don’t know when I’ll need you.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to get my team together later and plan for everything.’
‘I need to ask you one thing,’ Ronnie said, looking Joe in the eye.
Joe held his gaze. He knew what was coming.
‘Do you think I did it? That I killed Carrie and my baby?’
Joe had been right. The quest for reassurance, that someone was fighting for him.
‘It doesn’t matter what I think,’ Joe replied. ‘It’s about the evidence, about whether you should be convicted.’
‘But I’m entitled to know, because you must have an opinion, and if it’s about me, I should know it.’
Joe considered what to say, and then he shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think you did it.’
Then Joe looked away, because the truth was that he didn’t know, and what frightened him most of all was that if Ronnie had done something so callous, killed his own child to cover up another crime, the lack of remorse in his eyes made him a very dangerous person.
Sam sat at a desk by a window, the only vacant one, because there was no blind to stop the sun from bleaching out the computer screen, and already the heat of the steady glare was sticking his shirt to his back. It gave him a view over the Incident Room, so he could work out who might help him, and who would do their best to not. Squads like this were always that three-way mix of jaded old-timers, canteen braggers, and those with talent on the rise. The canteen braggers were the ones to avoid, who thought that noise and fake camaraderie, wrapped up in tight pastel shirts, were the keys to success.
Sam watched the movement in the room for a few minutes, to judge who was liked and who wasn’t, looking for the smiles that quickly disappeared when the joke ended, and then logged into the police computer. He found the summaries of each case.
There was nothing remarkable about them, nor anything unusual about the girls. They were all a similar age, mid to late teens. Not children, but not really women either. All disappeared, with no warning, no trace. There must have been a weapon if they had been abducted, like a knife and a threat. The call logs for each night they disappeared had been collated, and as he scrolled through them he saw there had been no reports of struggles or screams. That made the connection seem more obvious, because it was another link. Not just Ben Grant, but also the way in which they disappeared.
People went missing and it wasn’t always foul play, Sam knew that, but these seemed different. In most cases, you could look to a reason. A history of running away or run-ins with the police. Drugs. Perhaps a boyfriend or the wrong crowd. If there were no calls about a fight or screams, they were either runaways or else they went willingly. But, in these cases, runaways didn’t seem likely. Their backgrounds showed no signs of anything being wrong. They weren’t from bad families. There were no concealed drug problems or boyfriends who made the family nervous. All they knew was that their daughters went out one evening and never returned. There were headlines for a few days, with media appeals and soundbites from those closest to them, and then the story dwindled as news of each missing person faded, rehashed only when there was another disappearance.
Sam remembered how they had been swamped after Ellie’s murder, and that was before instant headlines on the internet were the norm. Cameras outside the gate, reporters shouting for a quote, their deadlines more important than the family’s grief. But how could a few words summarise what they felt? The victims in these cases were not children, but the first two were pretty and white, and that had got the press interested.
He thought again of Ellie. Her murder had shaped his adult life. He had been a university student when she was killed, studying English, but Ellie’s death changed everything. He dropped out so that he could look after his parents, the eldest boy. That was the year his career changed, because he saw what the police did for his family, and he joined within twelve months. If any good had come from it, the fact that he had done the right thing in his career was it.
It had been different for Joe, almost as if Ellie’s death was something he wanted to get away from. It had always been Sam, not Joe, who had been there for his parents, held their hands through their darkest time, helped them somehow carry on with their lives. Joe just headed off to university and left everything behind. Sam had resented that at first, but maturity had taught him that people dealt with grief in different ways. Ellie’s killer had done despicable things to her in her final moments, and to Sam it had seemed that Joe’s way of coping with that had been to try not to dwell on it.
Sam tried to focus on the case again. Four attractive young women, with long flowing hair and bright smiles, but there was nothing else to link them apart from the Ben Grant case. They were from different parts of Manchester, different backgrounds, and none of them were friends. If it hadn’t been for the Ben Grant connection, it would have seemed like just random bad luck that they came across whoever made them disappear. None of them had given any clue about where they were going. Two had just left the house and never returned. One had gone missing after running an errand. Another had lied about where she was going.
There was a noise in front of him. He looked up. It was one of the detectives he had noticed the day before. He was in just a shirt, his jacket draped over a chair, but he needed a larger one, because his biceps pushed against his sleeves. He was carrying a tray filled with cups. ‘Hello, new boy,’ he said.
He glanced back at the room when he said it, so Sam knew that he was about to be the butt of a joke.
‘It’s not “new boy”,’ Sam said, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘My name is Sam Parker. And you are?’
‘You can call me Ged,’ he said, and put the tray on the desk, making the cups clatter. ‘Fresher’s privilege. You get to make us all a drink.’