Christopher Manley began to outline his staff positions as she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket.
Lena Wiley stifled a yawn. Kim listened to his plans. She didn’t need to consult the plan of the shopping centre with little marked crosses on it. She knew the area well and had been called to many an incident during her time as a constable.
Her phone stopped vibrating. Just give me a minute, she thought.
‘Well, thank you for that, Mr Manley. We’re all enlightened to know exactly where each of your guards will be standing and—’
‘What about staircase nine?’ Kim asked, cutting her off and speaking for the first time.
Lena now turned her annoyance Kim’s way.
Kim ignored her and continued her focus on Christopher Manley, who stifled a smile.
He consulted his plans again. ‘We don’t have a staircase nine on the drawings.’
‘Umm… excuse me,’ Lena said, ‘might this be something the two of you could discuss outside this—’
‘Right there,’ Kim said, ignoring the superintendent and leaning across the table. She stabbed an area of the plan that appeared to be a brick wall. ‘It was a service stairway to the upper level before the renovations. There’s still a door there that leads to an abandoned set of store rooms and a corridor that leads back to the new section.’
Kim knew because she’d got lost in that area when a suspect she’d been chasing for an ABH offence had suddenly disappeared from view.
Christopher smiled his thanks and placed a cross at the location. He looked to the councilman. ‘I guess that’s eight then.’
Bill Platt shook his head, indicating there would be no budget increase.
Christopher looked back at her as the phone once more vibrated in her pocket.
‘It’ll be covered,’ he assured.
‘As scintillating as that was,’ Lena said, ‘if we could move on to…’
Kim tuned out as she reached into her pocket for her phone. The people whose calls mattered the most knew she wasn’t to be disturbed. Woody had sent her, and Bryant was waiting outside.
That could only mean one person and he never rang to shoot the breeze.
Lena looked straight at her and stopped speaking for a second. Everyone looked her way.
Two missed calls from Keats.
‘Umm… officer, if you wouldn’t mind putting away your phone.’
Kim ignored her and pushed back her chair.
Lena Wiley’s face was colouring with rage. ‘Is there somewhere you need to be?’
Kim made no apology as she headed for the door, throwing the words back over her shoulder.
‘Oh yes, it appears there’s somewhere I’m needed way more than I’m needed here.’
Six
Stacey drummed her fingers on the desk as she waited for DS Michaels to answer the phone and tried to quieten her second thoughts. Maybe this wasn’t the case for her to get her teeth into if the team dealing with it had never even put the case to the CPS.
‘Michaels,’ said a low rumble of a voice at the other end.
‘DC Wood from Halesowen,’ she offered.
‘Sorry for the wait, love, I was taking a dump.’
Stacey shook her head. Some things never changed, and she didn’t have time to react to every old-school misogynistic officer on the force.
‘Yeah, thanks for that. Got a minute to talk about the sexual assault of Lesley Skipton?’
Silence.
‘You headed the case against—’
‘I know who she is, love. I’m wondering why you want to talk about her.’
But sometimes she did have time to react. ‘The name is Stacey, not love. I ain’t your daughter or your niece. I got the case in the shuffle.’
‘They sent you that one?’ he asked, so surprised that he didn’t even respond to her rebuke.
Now she was surprised that he was surprised.
Stacey knew that individual officers who had worked the cases didn’t choose which ones to shuffle. The decisions were made by the DCI or higher.
‘Why the surprise?’
‘I thought they only shuffled cases with a chance of changing the stats.’
Stacey felt that was a jaded view of the process. Of course the force wanted more solved cases on their books. It didn’t hurt when national statistics compared force against force like a score card, but she liked to think the priority was still about solving cases, finding bad people and protecting victims.
‘You don’t think the case is solvable?’
‘Oh, I think it’s solvable. I think we solved it. But it’ll never get to court.’
Stacey could feel her irritation growing. She hated defeatists. Her own earlier doubts dissolved. She was working this case regardless of what Michaels had to say.
‘So you’re convinced Sean Fellows raped Lesley Skipton?’ she asked.
‘Oh yeah. We’re sure he’s the person responsible for the attack on Lesley and thank God we got him for the rape of Gemma Hornley or the bastard would still be out there.’
‘I’m not getting it,’ Stacey said, trying to understand what he seemed to be unwilling to say.
‘Look, you know as well as I do that for a rape trial you need the victim. Doesn’t matter what else you’ve got cos, to a jury, unless you can show them a traumatised victim, any physical evidence is just sex.’
‘So?’
‘We couldn’t put Lesley on the stand.’
Stacey was shocked. She’d seen nothing in the files to say that Lesley had refused to testify.
‘She changed her mind?’
‘You’re not getting it, love. We couldn’t let her near the courtroom because of what she might say.’
‘Like what?’
He paused for a few seconds.
‘Go see her, Stacey,’ he said, using her actual name. ‘Talk through the assault with her and then you’ll get why we couldn’t put her on the stand.’
Seven
The first things Kim noticed once she arrived at the crime scene were the blue jacket and jeans: the only description given for the woman separated from her daughter earlier.
Once she’d escaped the INEPT meeting, she’d listened to the voicemail left by Keats on his second time of calling. The message had simply stated that he had a body and the location.
Fielder Road was a side street that branched off Brierley Hill High Street. It had once held a couple of butchers and greengrocer stores before the Asda Superstore had moved in. Six of the shops had been boarded up, and the end two had been demolished, and that’s where Keats had directed her to come.
It had taken her brain less than a second to calculate that the crime scene was under a hundred metres from the Shop N Save she’d been in earlier.
And right now, she was looking down at a fair-haired woman who bore a striking resemblance to the little girl whose mother had now been found.
A wave of sadness washed over her as she remembered the child clutching the teddy bear given to her by the shop staff, clinging to it in the absence of her mother who would never hold her tightly again. Just this morning, that little girl had been leading a normal life, out shopping with her mother like thousands of others. Kim was always amazed that such a normal day could turn into the worst day of your life. Where was the klaxon? Where was the warning that this day would, in the future, hold significance against all others?