Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) (20 page)

‘No
comment.’

‘It’s
what Miranda Hargreaves says.’

‘Her
word against mine, then, innit?’ Pegley blurted out belligerently. ‘You can’t
prove it was even me there.’

‘You’ve
just
told
me it was you, Darren,’ Zoltan said. ‘It’s on tape; it’s your statement. I
didn’t coerce you into it. You made it voluntarily, after taking legal advice.’

‘I
ain’t coughing to no rape. You ain’t got nothing to pin it on me.’

‘Haven’t
I?’ Zoltan smiled, and leaned back happily in his chair. ‘Let me tell you what
I have and haven’t got. I have got stolen property found in your flat, which
has been positively identified as belonging to Miranda Hargreaves. I’ve got
your account on tape of how you and Michael Bayliss got into 2 Langley Park
Road, and what you did there. And I’ve got Miss Hargreaves’ version of events,
which fits yours like a size eight glove. What I
haven’t
got is anything, other than
your word, that says it was Michael Bayliss who did that job with you.’

He
stopped for a moment to see if the implications were sinking in. Pegley’s
Adam’s apple bobbed gently.

‘Supposing
we never find Bayliss? Or, more likely, suppose we do and he denies ever having
been there? What then? All we’ve got is your statement. Your word for it; no
corroboration. So where does that leave me, Darren? All I have is you.’

Pegley’s
eyes were dark, shining circles of horror. ‘You bastard.’

‘You
were there when Miranda Hargreaves was raped,’ Zoltan went on, mercilessly. ‘You’ve
admitted having the case in your possession, and we can quite easily prove it
was you who sold the flute on. Don’t be under any illusion that I’m not going
to charge you with rape, Darren, but if you play straight with me about what
happened I might just be able to persuade the CPS to ask for seven years
instead of fifteen to life.’

‘He
fucking told me to!’

The
outburst was so unexpected that for a second afterwards there was total silence
in the room, apart from the faint echoes of Pegley’s cry ringing round the
white walls. Zoltan cleared his throat carefully, hoping his surprise hadn’t
shown.

‘Michael
Bayliss,’ he said, ‘told you to rape her?’

Pegley
nodded, looking as shocked as either of them.

‘Mr
Pegley nods to indicate that is what Bayliss said,’ Zoltan reported. He shook
his head slowly. ‘Darren, Darren. Pushing dope for gangs, and now rape by
proxy. Do you always do what people tell you?’

‘God
help me,’ Pegley said.

Zoltan
watched him inscrutably for a few long moments, noting the way his eyes swivelled
to the flashing recording light, as though willing the machine off..

‘You’ve
left it a bit late for anyone else,’ he said.

‘I am awake now.’

Jasmin
had ridden back to Croydon with the passenger window open as a measure against
the queasiness of the rudely awakened. The cool breeze did, indeed, seem to
have revived her, although to Anne’s mind the ever muddier areas around her
eyes were not lightly to be ignored.

‘Look,’
she said, ‘you can’t go on forever, you know.’

‘I
cannot sleep when I should be working.’

‘Come
on,’ Anne pleaded. ‘We’ve all done it. Besides, you’ve earned a rest.’

Jasmin
made a dismissive noise. She fingered her jumper and scowled. ‘I could use a
wash. I feel sticky.’

‘Well,
then.’

‘Go
to the nick,’ she decreed, and folded her arms with a smile of triumph. ‘The
water is warmer.’

‘I
did try.’ Anne shook her head and braked for a young mother with a pushchair at
a zebra crossing. ‘All I can say is thank God I’m doing the driving.’

For the time being,
Jasmin was right. A hot shower had done much to crank her weary brain up to a
sustainable level of awareness. But her body had taken it upon itself to remind
her that, whatever her reasons, she was not superhuman. Her limbs felt leaden,
and her head able only with a conscious effort to hold itself upright. As she
walked into the office she briefly gripped the doorframe for support. In all
conscience, she thought, breathing deeply, flooding her bloodstream with
oxygen, she couldn’t skive off. Tonight, after her shift was done, she’d switch
off her mobile, turn in early, and no cold or express trains or mouldy walls or
ringing phones would disturb her long slumber.

There
was no sign of Sophia, but Helen and one or two of the others were around.
Lucky looked up with an anxious smile at Jasmin’s approach. ‘The DI just
called. He says,’ she looked away, ‘he thought he told you to go home.’

Had
Anne ratted on her, or did Zoltan simply know her too well? She said, ‘And what
else?’

‘He’s
nailed Pegley.’

‘Uh-huh?’
Making it to her desk, she felt her knees buckle under her and she collapsed
with undignified lethargy into her chair. ‘For what exactly?’

‘Raping
Miranda Hargreaves. It was all just about how she told it to me and Jeff. The
other bloke was this Bayliss character. Pegley did the rape while he was out of
the room.’ The words were chattering out of Lucky’s mouth, like rapid fire.
‘Then when Bayliss came back he was so mad at him for leaving his DNA behind he
grabbed the first thing to hand and - ’

‘The
flute?’

‘Yeah,
and raped her again with that: “Look, this is how it
should
be done.”’ Suddenly, for no
apparent reason, she tore the top sheet off the notepad she’d been referring
to, screwed it into a ball and threw it across the room. She sat with her arms
folded.

‘Are
you OK?’ Jasmin frowned, startled.

‘Yeah,’
Lucky said. ‘Are you?’

Helen
Wallace, who’d been earwigging, looked up from her paperwork. ‘That’s a point,’
she said, studying Jasmin’s pouched eyes. ‘You don’t look as if you’ve - ’

‘I
had forty winks earlier.’

‘Look,
go home,’ Helen said. ‘We’ll manage.’

‘What
I told her,’ Anne White said, coming in with two coffees. She put both in front
of Jasmin, changed her mind and took one for herself. ‘Silly moo won’t listen.’

Jasmin
said, ‘I sign out at five-thirty, right? I am OK till then.’

Helen
considered. ‘All right. But you stay in the office. Any callouts, I’m sending
somebody else. Deal?’

Too
tired to argue, Jasmin nodded. Satisfied, Helen turned her attention to what
had originally disturbed her. But Lucky had picked up and binned the ball of
paper and, with no sign of the petulance that had apparently caused her to
throw it, was back at her desk, whiting out a mistake on the form she was
filling in.

Thursday

In theory, the
Special Crime office meeting took priority over anything short of attending
your own funeral. In theory, it was the only time Sophia could ever hope to
have all her team in one room. In practice, someone was always in court, or
attending a call, or out on enquiries. This morning Kim and Marie were absent,
chasing a halfway promising lead on Meredith and company at a night shelter in
Pimlico; Jasmin, not entirely unaccountably, was also missing.

‘First
on the agenda,’ Sophia began, ‘our rape series.’ Several heads went up.
‘Zoltan, Jasmin and Anne spent most of yesterday grafting away at a probable
breakthrough. Where is Jasmin, by the way?’ No-one knew. Helen caught her
guv’nor’s eye; she reckoned she could make a shrewd guess, but it could wait.
Sophia nodded and moved on. ‘Zoltan.’

The
DI stood up. ‘A young burglar called Darren Pegley has confessed to being at 2
Langley Park Road and, though he still hasn’t said so in as many words, he did
rape Miranda Hargreaves. However, I don’t fancy him for the other assaults. He
has a plausible alibi for Violet McMinn, and anyway none of the descriptions
we’ve been given match Pegley remotely. The one we’re looking for is the kid he
was with that night.’ The palm of his hand patted the photofit Miranda
Hargreaves had helped put together. There was some despondent muttering. Even
on its own it didn’t look convincing. ‘His name is Michael Bayliss. He has a
record - or perhaps I should say he
did
.’

‘Juvenile?’
Helen asked.

‘How
did you guess?’ He smiled thinly. ‘According to Camberwell’s local intelligence
officer, who holds the only remaining information we have on him, there are no
adult convictions. His last caution was for selling a stolen moped five years
ago; nothing further until he attained the age of twenty-one last year,
whereupon his juvenile record was expunged and destroyed in accordance with
policy.’ There were groans. ‘If written documentation is to be believed, he
suddenly turned over a new leaf at seventeen. Trouble is he no longer lives at
the LKA, and no-one there knows where the family went. Pegley also denies knowing
his present whereabouts.’

‘If
he raped Mrs McMinn last week,’ Nina Tyminski said, ‘bastard’s still around
somewhere.’

‘Exactly.
We’re looking for a twenty-two year old IC1 male, height six foot four, light
frizzy hair, pale complexion, slim, rangy build. He has a distinct...’ Zoltan
hesitated for an instant. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he’d seen
Lucky put her hand up, but when he looked she was busy jotting notes. ‘He has a
distinct MO. One, he strikes in the victim’s own home. Two, he breaks in at
ground level through sash or drop catch windows, things that can easily be
forced. Three, he doesn’t bother concealing his face but relies on darkness as
cover. Four, and most significant, he’s not a rapist in the legal sense. Since
he’s apparently motivated by a desire not to have his DNA on file, his method
is to pick out some phallic object from among the victim’s possessions and
sexually assault her with that. He then takes the object away with him. He
seems careful not to take anything which might be easily identified; usually
something mundane like a kitchen utensil or a cheap candlestick - ’

‘What
about the flute?’ Lucky said.

‘Ah,
yes, the flute.’ He looked at her. ‘The flute of course is decidedly
not
mundane, and for this we are
thankful. It seems he was a bit rattled by Mr Pegley donating his bodily fluids
to the cause of forensic science. In a manner of speaking it’s his bad luck it
wasn’t some mass-produced Japanese instrument. My guess is he realised this
later, and dumped it on Pegley to get rid of, figuring he’d be too scared to
shop him if he got caught.’

‘No
honour among pervs,’ Sandra Jones said.

‘Any
questions?’

‘What
bothers me,’ Sandra came back, ‘is why take Pegley along at all? From what I
can see he seems to have done fine on his own apart from that one time.’

The
DI shrugged. ‘To show off?’ he suggested. ‘Pegley didn’t go into that part of
it.’

‘And
we still don’t know who this
other
accomplice was,’ Nina said.

‘You’re
talking about Denise Cole?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That
one sounds like an older man,’ Zoltan said. ‘It’s the earliest we know about,
so possibly Bayliss was the apprentice there. Could be Denise disturbed them,
and because she was a bit of all right Bayliss decided to have some fun.’

A
phone rang. Helen picked it up. ‘Special Crime, Helen Wallace.’

‘The
older man doesn’t feature in any of the other incidents,’ Sophia said.

‘Hardly
surprising,’ Sandra commented.

‘Denise’s
statement did say he seemed disturbed by what Bayliss was doing, yes.’

Sandra
said, ‘Isn’t it worth pursuing? If this bloke’s a known villain, maybe he’s
tried using it as a bargaining chip at some point. Long shot, I know.’

‘Good
thinking, all the same,’ Sophia said. ‘Lucky, d’you fancy getting on the wires
again, see if - ?’

‘Oh,
no!’ Helen Wallace exclaimed into the phone, much louder than she’d intended.
Everyone stared at her. Her face wore a strained expression. She listened,
nodded and said, ‘OK, then. Come in when you can. Bye.’

She
hung up. Sophia said, ‘Jasmin?’

‘Yeah.’
Helen’s lips were pursed. ‘In private, guv. It’s not funny.’

‘Why’re
you laughing, then?’ Sandra demanded.

‘Mind
your own business.’

‘What’s
it worth?’ Sandra said, her eyes with a predatory gleam as Helen struggled to
keep the corners of her mouth down.

She was aware of
banging, of voices, in what seemed to be a fitful abstract dream. A sudden
upwards leap of consciousness, prompted perhaps by a particularly loud bang,
made her aware of people close by. Someone was speaking in a strange language.
No - English, but fragmented, almost pidgin. There was another voice, deeper
and more authoritative. ‘Who is it, the old boy?’ More unintelligible gabble.
The banging restarted. ‘Hello? You all right in there?’

Jasmin
opened her eyes, then screwed them shut again as light stabbed in. Warily she parted
her lids halfway. She could see linoleum, a door; the knocking and the voices
must originate on the other side. She had no idea where she was. She decided to
open the door and find out. She tried to stand up.

Nothing
happened.

Her
heart leapt against her chest in panic. She tried again. She realised she was
very cold. She was conscious of the commands to move being issued by her brain,
but her legs would not respond. She could feel them attached to her body like
slabs of frozen, lifeless meat. Something was horribly wrong.

She
got a grip and woke up. Look at this sensibly. Slowly she pried open her
memory. She recalled signing out just after six, and being at home without
remembering how she’d got there. She remembered her despair that sleep had
again deserted her, and how she’d sat watching TV half the evening, unable to
get her head round anything more challenging. From what her stomach was telling
her, it didn’t seem as though she’d eaten.

Finally,
after
News at Ten
,
she’d gone along to the bathroom, deciding maybe the ritual of getting ready
for bed would do the trick. It was the last thing she remembered.

This
in mind, she took stock of her surroundings. She was still in the bathroom.
Relief flooded through her. She would not, after all, be confined to a
wheelchair for the rest of her life.

But
she’d better say something before her housemates broke the door down.

‘Mark?’

‘Jasmin?
That you in there?’

‘Uh-huh,’
she answered sheepishly. ‘My legs are numb. I fell asleep sitting on the
toilet.’

‘What?’
Mark broke off as the Thai student muttered something. ‘Can you reach the door
to unlock it?’

‘I
will try.’

Legs,
when they don’t work, are heavy. Jasmin slid off the seat and plummeted to the
floor with a crash that knocked the wind out of her. Tears of anger and
mortification welled in her eyes. Sweeping up the shreds of her dignity, she
managed to wriggle over to the door and, with a quick check to make sure she
had her nightie on, reach up to draw the bolt.

As
she submitted to Mark and Thien carrying her back to her room, the first pangs
of returning circulation shot like period pains through her pelvis and down her
thighs. In a way, it was worse than being numb.

Jeff Wetherby
already felt as if he’d been kicked by a horse, and Sophia’s walking into the office
the moment he gave up and answered her persistently ringing phone didn’t do
much to improve his mood.

‘Guv.’
Hand over the receiver, he tried not to glare at her. ‘Nottingham on the line.’
She nodded and took the phone from him. He returned to his desk, still
brooding. He caught Marie Kirtland’s eye. ‘Jasmin OK?’ he asked, trying to
sound casual. ‘Took her coffee, she nearly bit my head off.’

‘You
not heard?’

‘Heard
what?’

‘It’s
a classic,’ Sandra, who was passing, said.

‘Tell
me.’

Struggling
to suppress a smirk, Sandra told him. He smiled, but she could see in his eyes
he didn’t find it the least bit funny. She exchanged glances with Marie.
Miserable bugger. There was always one.

There was no
prophetic dream, no sudden flash of inspiration or intuition. Nina had been
right; what was bothering her would occur to her sooner or later. Now, without
any detectable method of arrival, the knowledge was in her head. Kim Oliver sat
bolt upright and looked across at Marie.

‘Ain’t
got a magnifying glass, have you, by any chance?’

‘No.’
Marie frowned. ‘Why should I have a magnifying glass? I’m not Sherlock Holmes.’

But
Kim was already at the notice board, peering at the Polaroid of the
blood-drenched Debbie Clarke. There it was, plain as day. It wasn’t wishful thinking.

She
called Nina over. ‘Did Sophia say where she was going?’

‘Coleridge’s
office,’ Nina said. ‘Not sure how long for.’

‘Never
mind. Least we know she’s in the building.’ Kim tapped the photo triumphantly.
‘I’ve cracked it.’

‘That
thing that was nagging you?’

‘Look
at her right arm.’

Nina
peered. ‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘It moved.’

‘Not
camera shake, or you’d get a double image,’ Kim insisted. ‘It’s blurred. Her
arm moved as the picture was taken.’

‘You mean - ’

‘I
mean she ain’t dead,’ Kim declared, loudly, causing several of the others to
stop what they were doing and come over to have a look. ‘Least she wasn’t at
that precise moment.’

‘Hang
on,’ Nina said. ‘It might just’ve slipped.’

‘No.
See where the right arm’s draped across her middle? If it was gonna slip, it’d
slip
down
,
right? But the blurred edge is at the bottom. She moved it
up
.’

‘God
help her,’ Anne White said, ‘if she was still alive then. I mean
look
at her. The wounds, the
blood...’

‘Not
just alive,’ Marie Kirtland said. ‘Conscious.’

‘How
d’you mean?’ Kim asked.

‘No
funny remarks,’ Marie said, ‘but if you were lying there starkers and somebody
suddenly pointed a camera at you, what would
you
do?’

‘Try
and cover myself,’ Nina said.

‘That’s
why her arm moved. She’s got a newspaper over her fanny, so that’s OK, but her
tits are exposed. She’s trying to cover ‘em up.’

‘Yeah,
but how’s any of that possible,’ Lucky said, ‘with those sort of injuries? Even
if you’re still alive, you’re not gonna be able to twitch an eyelid, never mind
- ’

‘I
think I can make a guess at the answer to that,’ a voice said.

As a
body, they turned. Sophia, grim-faced, was standing behind them. A glance from
her sent them shuffling back to their desks.

‘Everyone’s
attention, please,’ she called out for the benefit of those few who hadn’t been
distracted by the commotion. They all stopped work and listened. ‘I’m not sure
whether this counts as good news or bad. I’ve just been on the phone to the
forensic lab. They’ve got the DNA result on the epithelials and the blood from
the bed. The epithelials are Debbie Clarke’s, or at least some of them are.’

She
hesitated. She looked angry, or embarrassed, or something. With their guv’nor
it was hard to tell. They waited.

‘The
blood isn’t,’ she said.