To Catch a Rabbit (9 page)

‘Funny,’ Mr Mayhew said from the doorway. ‘Some bugger’s nicked it.’

‘When did you last see it?’

‘Well, it was here when I was took in to hospital, I’m sure of that.’

He started to cough. Sean helped him back to his seat in the kitchen. He could feel the rattle of the old man’s lungs vibrating through his bony arm.

‘Can you tell me the name of the person who rents the far field? They might know something about the trailer.’

‘Someone living in it, your boss said.’

‘Yes.’ Sean wasn’t sure how much Mr Mayhew had been told and how much he could take.

‘Forsyth. He rents that field.’

‘Have you got a number?’

‘On the wall by the phone.’

Sean followed where Mayhew pointed his stick. The large cat was eyeing him impassively. Only when he was close enough to read the numbers did it begin to growl, its ears flat and its tail fluffed out.

‘Pay no attention to Tiddles. She’s expecting.’

Sean found an old envelope and jotted the number down on it. He needed to be out of there. Burger was tooting his horn on the driveway and the smell inside the house was going to make him vomit soon, if the cat didn’t get him first.

As he made his way to the door Mr Mayhew called after him.

‘Will you make sure it’s reported, my caravan from out the back? See if you can sort out who’s nicked it. There’s a good lad.’

Carly Jayson had a huge laugh. It bounced off the Formica tables of the staff canteen as Sean did his impression of Burger wheezing his way out of the reeking farmhouse. He liked Carly, she had a good attitude. The other person at the table was Sandy Schofield, a civilian who worked in admin. She and Carly were a couple. Partners in crime, Sandy liked to say. Sandy liked to mother him and Carly treated him like a mate. She could also beat him hands down at snooker, which she never failed to remind him.

‘And then there was this massive cat.’ Sean was enjoying having an audience. ‘You should have seen it!’

‘Burger’s long lost brother?’ Carly said.

The three of them were still laughing when Lizzie Morrison put her tray down on the edge of the table.

‘Mind if I join you?’

After so much noise the silence was horrible. Sean broke it. ‘No problem.’ But as he spoke, Carly was already standing up.

‘Got to be off.’

‘Me too.’ Sandy tidied their empty sandwich packets on to her tray. ‘I need to type up some handover notes.’

Sean fingered the label on his water bottle. He’d finished eating but he had time.

‘Catch you later, ladies.’ When they’d gone he looked at Lizzie. She was jabbing a fork into a heap of lettuce leaves. ‘You all right?’

‘Mmm. Fine.’

‘Really? You don’t sound fine?’ He could see the muscle in her cheek pulsing as she chewed on her salad. ‘Don’t mind Carly, she’s just like that.’

‘Rude?’

‘Just a bit of a tough nut.’

‘One of the lads?’ She gulped down her water. ‘And I’m not.’

‘You’re Scene of Crime. It’s different, I mean it’s not personal. It’s just a bit us and them in this place.’

‘Well I’m not ‘them’ either. The officers in CID don’t speak to me because I’m not police and the old time SOCOs hate me too. It’s the graduate-training thing. Posh totty, that’s what they think of me.’

Sean didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t expecting this from Lizzie Morrison. The self-assured, intelligent, my-Dad’s-on-the-board-of-Doncaster-Rovers-Miss-Morrison. She blew her nose and took a deep breath.

‘Forget it. Just had a bad morning, that’s all. What were you all laughing about anyway?’

‘Not you, just…a colleague.’ She didn’t look as if she believed him. ‘DCI King, if you must know.’

‘That idiot? I wish I’d known, I could have joined in.’

Sean tried to re-tell the trip to Lower Brook Farm. He wanted to make Lizzie laugh, but he couldn’t get the timing quite right and she took it all too seriously.

‘And you gave the number to Burger?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Did you keep a copy?’

‘No. I…just wrote it on a bit of paper I found by the phone, an old envelope.’

‘Why didn’t you use your notebook?’

‘I didn’t think. Sorry.’

‘Never mind.’ She went back to spearing her lettuce. ‘It’s just that he should have passed it on to me. If we need to go over the crime scene again. I mean, if we ever find the bloody crime scene. Why would anyone move a catering trailer which is behind a cordon?’

‘Someone who doesn’t want it found.’

‘Is that Burger’s line of enquiry?’ she said.

‘Burger’s not bothered about Su-Mai…I mean, the victim.’

‘Because he doesn’t think she is a victim. Just a nuisance. Like the second girl. The lab results are back. It’s the same batch of heroin.’ She met his eyes. ‘You said Su-Mai.’

Sean picked at the label on the water bottle. ‘Just a name I made up. Can’t keep calling her
that Chinese girl.
’

‘I had an email from a detective I know in The Human Trafficking Service. Said there might be a connection with something they’re doing. Interesting?’

‘What does Burger say?’

‘Nothing. I haven’t told him. Let’s keep it between the two of us.’

The two of us. He liked the sound of that. He went up to the counter to get them both a cup of coffee. When he got back she talking was on the phone.

‘Okay. Yeah. Okay. And can you call Donald too?’ She wrote something in her notebook, her quick fingers gripped so tight round the pen he thought she would snap it. ‘Okay, I’ll be right there.’

He put the cups down.

‘Sorry, Sean. I’ve got to go. There’s another body on the Chasebridge Estate.’ 

‘Take them off! Max! For goodness sake, they should take their shoes off on the front step!’

And it unravelled from there. Her voice was too harsh. She heard it too late. Ben started crying and Sophie sulked.

‘Welcome home, dear wife.’

Max hung his coat up and went into the front room. She followed him and stood in front of the television.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ve just cleared up, washed up and there’s a slice of cheese-on-toast, turning to rubber on the kitchen table, which I haven’t even got round to eating.’

‘Big deal’, Max counter-attacked. ‘I’ve had twenty-four hours of looking after the children, cooked a Sunday lunch, which you didn’t appear for, run round the park with a kite like an idiot, when frankly, I would rather have put my feet up and watched the rugby.’

‘Stop it, you two!’ Sophie walked into the living room. ‘You’re like a fucking soap opera.’

‘Don’t swear!’ They said together.

Sophie laughed first, then Max joined in. Karen told herself to smile, but she wasn’t feeling it. At bedtime, she tried to make it better with a story for Ben. He wanted ‘Owl Babies’, with its beautiful pictures of wide-eyed owls who miss their mummy. His hair smelled of shampoo, floppy and dark, soft under her nose.

After turning Ben’s light off, she stood in Sophie’s doorway, watching her daughter flick through a teen magazine. Sophie had become untouchable. Karen could sit on the end of her bed, if she was lucky, but only if Sophie was in the mood for a chat. Her skin reflected the pink shade of the bedside light and her lips were red from the wind, like a hand-tinted postcard of a silent starlet. There were girls of Sophie’s age on the files at work. Unaccompanied children, who’d slipped through the net, sometimes disappeared altogether. Names, ages, country of origin. Karen shivered. She tried to keep the two worlds apart but they seemed to be getting closer.

‘Mum? You can sit down. You’re really worried about Uncle Phil, aren’t you?’ Sophie pulled her earplugs out. The tinny whine of the MP3 player was still audible.

Karen sighed. ‘Yes. I am. But…’

‘He’ll be all right, won’t he? I couldn’t bear it if anyone else in this family was to die.’

Karen sat on the end of the bed and looked at Sophie. ‘Do you think about your sister?’

‘Sometimes. But I feel terrible Mum. I don’t really remember what she looked like.’

There was one picture of Cara on the mantelpiece. A tiny silver frame that often disappeared behind greetings cards or the children’s artwork. It was not a particularly good likeness. Cara asleep. Gone to sleep. The graveyard euphemism. There was a photo album, but Karen kept it in the back of the desk drawer. She knew its contents by heart: Cara in the hospital, red and slick from the birth, wrapped in blue; Cara’s eyes open, dark pools of unknown thought; Cara balanced in Sophie’s arms like a piece of precious porcelain; Cara beginning to smile. Whenever she felt strong enough to drill down into her soul – for it was excruciating - she would take it out. It was a beautiful pain actually, one that reminded her she was still alive, still feeling something.

‘Mum. You’re miles away.’ Sophie put down her magazine.

‘Remind me tomorrow, and I’ll show you the photo album.’

‘Of Cara?’

Yes. She needed to share it. Perhaps it would release the grip it had on her. She needed to make some space, now there was the potential for a new pain. If Phil wasn’t coming back, she would have to let Cara fade out, join the grandmother she never saw, in the shadows where we put those who’ve been dead the longest.

‘Does that mean I don’t have to go to school tomorrow?’

‘Oh my God, it’s Monday tomorrow.’ Uniforms, packed lunches, had Max even put the machine on?

By the time she’d finished all the Sunday night chores Max had gone to bed. Karen felt restless. She poured a large glass of red wine and headed for the little study next to the bathroom. She thought about the young PCSO in Doncaster and his confusion that she was something to do with a Chinese girl. She searched the Internet and it was all there on the Doncaster Gazette website:
Mystery of Unknown Woman
, and a sub-heading,
Tragic Chinese Drug Death
. There was a stiff police request for information about ‘a former refreshment vehicle in which the deceased had been living at the time of her death’. She wondered what that meant. The Chinese link was interesting; she might mention it to Jaz or his friend, Charlie Moon.

In bed, Max stirred and then woke fully. He held her tightly to his chest and kissed her head. She knew he wanted sex. She didn’t, not really, but it had been a while. Max pulled her on top of him and she hoped she didn’t give herself away. She tried hard to concentrate, to banish the faces and voices of her weekend. An image of the fat detective popped into her head. Burger, that was what the young officer had called him. She smiled at the rubbish pun. Max smiled up at her, and she closed her eyes. Eventually she let herself go with it, smoothed by the wine. As long as she kept her eyes closed, she could be held in the spell. But she couldn’t resist. Like Lot’s wife turning round, the shock of Max’s pale skin and his gaze, fixed on her left breast, nearly turned her to salt.

The next morning she was early for work, so she decided to walk. As she passed under Bootham Bar, the sun broke through the cloud and the Minster came into view. She never tired of it, especially at this time of day with nobody around. In the Minster Gardens a sign reminded the public that drinking alcohol was forbidden. She sat on the edge of one the benches, which was still damp from last night’s rain, and watched a man in a quilted anorak, shiny with dirt, begin his day with a long drink of Diamond White. Head-back and bottle-up, he almost breathed it in. She wondered if he’d been there all night. The dead girl in Doncaster was a heroin addict. She wondered about Phil. She knew he’d been into drugs, but not that sort. He smoked cannabis and she had to assume he’d done ecstasy, or something like it. He’d been into the dance scene for long enough. It had all passed her by somehow; she hoped it would pass Sophie by too.

Jaz wasn’t in the office. She looked at her ‘to do’ list and tried to clear a space in her brain for paperwork, but her mind kept slipping off elsewhere. The alcoholic in the park had begun a thread of ideas, which she couldn’t switch off. It kept leading her back again to a dead Chinese girl. Finally, Jaz blew in and went straight upstairs. After lunch she decided it was time to test a few ideas out on him.

‘Got a minute?’

‘Of course.’ He gestured to a pile of boxes, where she perched uneasily and began by telling him about the unidentified girl.

‘The thing that bothers me is the heroin overdose. I may be way out of line here, but is it a common drug for young women in the Chinese community? I just wondered whether you friend Charlie Moon might be interested, if there’s a trafficking link.’

‘What else do we know?’

‘That she was a sex worker.’

‘Do you think she could be connected to the haulage company in Grimsby?’

‘That’s what I was wondering.’ she said. ‘Do you think we should ask Moon to see if there’s a DNA match between the girl and the samples from the lorries?’

‘I always said you had a good nose. Fancy a brew?’ He led the way downstairs. ‘Do you mind me asking what you were doing down there anyway? Doncaster doesn’t strike me as your ideal weekend-break location.’

She began to tell him about Phil. He came back to her desk with two mugs.

‘And you didn’t say anything? Come on, Karen, I could have pulled

some strings, I know a few policemen, and women, come to think of it.’

‘I know, but…for all I know, my sister-in-law is right and he’s just gone off.’

‘Cherchez la femme?’ He sounded like Inspector Clouseau and Karen laughed despite herself. ‘Leave it with me,’ he continued. ‘I’ll have a dig about, Charlie owes me one.’ He handed her a coffee and perched on the edge of her desk. ‘You could be on to something with the trafficking link. I wonder if the guys in Doncaster have still got the girl, or some of her DNA at least. I hope they haven’t cremated her already and burnt the evidence.’