Strangers Read online

  There was a dumbfounded silence in the room. If there’d been any doubts in any minds about the necessity of this action-plan, they’d been expunged now.

  ‘They may be ours, they may not be,’ Slater said, ‘but … well, they probably are. All the signs are there. If so, that makes it six victims and counting. Ladies, this assailant is absolutely relentless and the public is getting wind of it. When this next two hit the headlines, there’ll be a total circus, which’ll mean extra pressure on the investigation team, more stress, more mistakes. We need to pull together and get it sorted. So go out there and do your job, but watch your backs as well, and I mean watch them closely. The more men die at the hands of Jill the Ripper – sorry, I hate using that name but I don’t see what difference objecting to it will make now – the more vulnerable you people are going to be.’

  Lucy would find out for herself what Slater meant by this approximately one hour after arriving at her designated pitch, which was a small picnic area – in reality little more than a thinly treed grass verge – just off the stretch of the A580 dual carriageway, better known locally as the East Lancashire Road or ‘East Lancs’, that ran south-west from Boothstown towards Lowton.

  Her guardian angel that evening was PC Andy Clegg, a TSG officer in his early twenties. He was a bullish lad, well built around the chest and arms, but whose regulation-cut dark hair, ruddy, chubby features and permanently grave expression only served to underline his youth. Lucy wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged by this or unnerved. When they chatted before setting off, Lucy seeking nothing more than an informal introduction, he responded to her questions in taut monosyllables, which suggested that he was either very focused on the job, which was good, or that he was tongue-tied and abashed in the presence of a female officer who happened to be showing leg and cleavage, which wasn’t so good. There was a time to be embarrassed, and this wasn’t it.

  Clegg would be sitting in an unmarked car on wasteland on the other side of the East Lancs – a battered old relic of a Ford Focus, equipped with a pair of night-vision binoculars. Without doubt he’d have the physical ability to help her, and the willingness to get stuck in – young male coppers were nothing if not reckless in their efforts to prove themselves. She just hoped he had the judgement to go with it.

  And this was to be tested as soon as they arrived at her pitch.

  Lucy was dropped off at the picnic site by an unmarked van with fake company logos on the sides. The hoped-for impression was that she’d just successfully serviced a bunch of navvies. The TSG lads inside the van assisted by beating on its sides and whooping aloud as the vehicle roared away. Following this, she stood out in the open, which wasn’t difficult given the proximity of the streetlights and the semi-leafless state of the autumnal trees, brandished a fistful of twenty-pound notes, and commenced a slow, deliberate count.

  It had the desired effect.

  Two girls were waiting nearby, only half discernible in the dank shadows. One of them was black, one of them white; both wore leather jackets, short skirts and heels. They sauntered towards her side-by-side.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ the white girl wondered, her accent strong Scouse.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ Lucy replied, tucking the money up the sleeve of her mac.

  The black girl leaned forward menacingly, an impression enhanced by an old scar that diagonally bisected her mouth and was still clearly visible despite a preponderance of emulsion-like lip gloss. ‘What the fuck’s it got to do with you, you gobby bitch!’ she snarled. ‘This is our pitch and you’re fucking trespassing!’

  Lucy shrugged, but her spine was already tingling. ‘Don’t see a signpost, love.’

  The black girl snapped her hand out, and a gleaming blade sprang into view. ‘I’ll slice your fucking tits off, you cow!’

  ‘Or alternatively, you can pay up,’ the Scouse girl said.

  Lucy gazed from one to the other, affecting dimness. ‘What?’

  ‘We share everything here. And we know you’re not short of cash given that road crew you’ve just balled … so cough up.’

  Even from across the dual carriageway, Lucy heard a thud from the back of the Ford Focus, as if Clegg was already getting set to intervene. That’d be great. She could just picture him clumping across the blacktop in his army surplus trousers, hoodie top and baseball cap. He’d save her of course, but it’d be quite a coincidence – that the moment the new girl was threatened, a tall, dark stranger stepped in.

  But by a miracle, perhaps suggesting that he was smarter than she’d thought, he held off.

  ‘So I have to pay you two for the privilege of standing here?’ Lucy said. ‘On this stretch of public highway which anyone else can use free of charge?’

  ‘See,’ the Scouse girl said to her mate. ‘Told you she was clever.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ Lucy said, suspecting they were bluffing but now knowing she had to call that bluff.

  ‘This look funny to you?’ The black girl offered the blade again.

  Though its glinting steel tip was now right under Lucy’s nose, less than an inch from severing her septum, she was determined to remain composed. That was all you could ever do in this job, pretend. It didn’t mean that, deep inside, her heart wasn’t going like the clappers.

  ‘Go on then,’ Lucy said. ‘Cut me up. I wonder what would make Mr Merryweather angrier? That … or the fact I had to share his hard-earned to buy you two off?’

  The two prostitutes didn’t exactly flinch, but the blankness of their expressions said more than words ever could.

  ‘You don’t work for Nick Merryweather,’ the Scouse girl finally replied.

  ‘Not directly,’ Lucy agreed, ‘but we know whose pocket you’ll ultimately be picking, don’t we!’

  She was onto a winner; she could tell. No one would believe that she had some kind of hotline to the Crew’s whoremaster-in-chief, but the mere fact she knew who he was would indicate that she was no novice, that she wasn’t just playing at this.

  ‘So go on, cut me!’ she urged them. ‘Or maybe you can put the sodding blade away … and just to show there’s no hard feelings, because yeah, I am trespassing a little bit, I can give you something to be going on with.’ She filched two twenties from under her sleeve, and offered one to each of them. Oddly enough, probably because this kind of thing had never happened before, they were hesitant to take them.

  ‘I’ve never seen you round here,’ the black girl said, still snarling, but the blade now lower. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  ‘I’m Keira,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Keira?’ The black girl hooted. ‘Jesus wept, couldn’t you think of anything more fucking original?’

  ‘Who are you?’ Lucy asked her.

  ‘I’m not telling you my fucking name.’ The girl pocketed her switchblade, but snatched the twenty and backed away. ‘Just piss off, you silly fucking mare.’

  The Scouse lass gave Lucy a long, searching look – as if somehow suspecting this thing still wasn’t right – then helped herself to her own twenty, taking it almost gingerly between thumb and forefinger, before turning on her heel and hurrying to catch up with her mate, the pair of them dwindling off along the leaf-cluttered verge.

  Lucy watched them as she slowly calmed herself down, wondering if any kind of bridge had been built there or perhaps if it was quite the opposite.

  ‘You won’t make friends that way, love,’ a voice said from somewhere to the right, seeming to answer the question for her. ‘They’ll just mark you as a soft touch and try and scam you again.’

  Lucy turned to the trees and had to squint through the darkness under their half-naked boughs. The dull yellow glow of the streetlights didn’t penetrate too far. However, her eyes were now attuning, and she realised that a third party was close at hand. Another girl, younger than the others by the looks of her, with longish red hair and a very short dress, was seated on top of a picnic table, high-heeled shoes resting on the bench in front of her, as she swigged fro
m a bottle of vodka.

  ‘And you’re not part of Necktie Nicky’s stable neither,’ she said, screwing the cap back on and giving a satisfied belch. ‘You wouldn’t dare give that much of his dosh away if you were.’

  Lucy ambled towards her. ‘I admit I’ve never met Mr Merryweather personally …’

  ‘No one has who’s so far down the food-chain that they have to walk these streets, love. Anyway, you can spare me the bullshit …’ The red-headed girl climbed down. ‘I know what you really are.’

  Lucy held her tongue, unsure how to respond.

  The girl slid the bottle into her shoulder bag, and struggled with the zip of her scruffy fleece jacket before finally drawing it up. She was shapely but short, not much more than five feet tall. There was no threat here, but the last thing Lucy needed was to be outed on her first night. She wondered what it was that might have given the game away.

  ‘You’re an independent, aren’t you?’ the girl said.

  Up close, even in the gloom, Lucy could see that she had a pretty face, though she smelled strongly of alcohol. If Lucy hadn’t been very used to it thanks to all the drunken prisoners she’d wheeled in over the years, it would have been nauseating.

  ‘And you’re new to the game,’ the girl added. ‘You know how I can tell? Because you haven’t got the thousand-yard stare. I’m Tammy, by the way. And that’s my real name too. I was christened Tamara. Can you fucking believe that?’

  It was an odd way to introduce herself; delivered in a casual, only half-interested tone, as if the information barely mattered.

  ‘Keira,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Yeah, I heard. So what’s the story, Keira? Lost your job? House repossessed? Kids hungry?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And you thought this’d be a piece of piss?’

  ‘Not exactly a piece of piss.’

  ‘Easy money then?’

  Lucy shrugged, took the wad of notes from under her sleeve and screwed it up into a ball. ‘You telling me I just got lucky when I met that gang of workmen?’

  Tammy eyed the money as it disappeared into Lucy’s bag. ‘Sometimes we get lucky, I suppose.’ She took a step back, this time eyeing Lucy herself. ‘You don’t look the worse for wear considering you’ve just been star-attraction in a backseat gangbang.’

  Lucy realised her mistake. She should have smeared her lippy and mussed her hair a little. But it was too late now. She could only brazen it out.

  ‘How many were there?’ Tammy asked.

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Jesus! Talk about getting off to a flyer. Anyway … your minge must be killing you, which means this one’s for me.’

  Lucy hadn’t realised it, but another vehicle had drawn up at the verge just behind them: a grey SUV with tinted windows. The front nearside window rolled downward.

  There were two guys inside it, one behind the wheel and one in the front passenger seat. This immediately struck Lucy as a potential problem, though if Tammy needed the custom, who was she to object? As the girl teetered across the grassy verge in her ridiculously high heels, the passenger grinned, white teeth splitting his thick black beard. He was somewhere in his early thirties, brawny and wearing a lumberjack-style plaid shirt.

  ‘You gents looking for a good time?’ Tammy tittered, leaning down at the window.

  Plaid Shirt’s expression rapidly changed – from lewd grin to twisted scowl.

  ‘YOU MURDERING SLAGS!’ he screamed, before throwing something into her face.

  Lucy caught a fleeting glimpse of a dark, lumpen object wrapped in what looked like white tissue. The next thing, Tammy’s hoarse voice rang out, an exclamation of horror and disgust, as she tottered backwards. The SUV sped away, howls of mocking laughter echoing from its interior. When Tammy turned to face Lucy, the excrement was smeared down her left cheek and around the side of her mouth. Solid fragments of it spattered her décolletage; a strip of filthy toilet paper had tucked itself into her cleavage.

  Quite clearly, the two most recent murders had finally hit the headlines.

  ‘Dirty bastards!’ Tammy stammered, eyes glimmering with tears of shock.

  Lucy hurried over to her. ‘Here, let me help.’

  She had some face wipes in her shoulder bag, but Tammy tried to pull away, too embarrassed in front of the new girl to allow herself to be assisted.

  ‘No,’ Lucy said, refusing to release her arm. ‘Let me help.’

  ‘Not here, for fuck’s sake!’ Tammy snapped, voice turning nasal as the tears flowed. ‘God, the stink!’

  ‘I can clean it off,’ Lucy insisted.

  ‘Yeah, but not out here!’ Tammy yanked her arm loose and strutted quickly away, working her way deeper into the copse of trees, heels clacking as she joined a paved pathway, which snaked from the road into denser shadows. Lucy followed, shoving the wipes back into her bag. Fleetingly, Tammy was invisible in the darkness ahead – it was only possible to follow her by her footfalls and sniffles. By the sounds of it, she’d quickly got on top of the tears. Probably couldn’t afford not to in this line of work. Lucy accelerated and fell into step alongside her. The path weaved away from the picnic area towards what looked like an open, well-lit space, though they passed several more girls before they got there, most of them standing talking quietly, indistinguishable in the darkness, only the tiny red pinpoints of cigarettes and the occasional whiff of cannabis revealing their presence.

  Tammy sniffled again and tried to wipe under her eyes, inadvertently smearing her fingertips with excrement. ‘Bastards!’ she hissed. ‘Can’t fucking believe this!’

  ‘Nor me,’ Lucy agreed.

  ‘Yeah, but you’re new. I ought to have learned my lesson by now.’

  The path ended at the edge of what was actually a lorry park. This was a rectangular dirt lot, rugged and rutted at this time of year, and about thirty acres in size. It was still close to the East Lancs, extending along it in a southerly direction, but was encircled on three sides by trees and undergrowth. At the far side stood a single-storey red-brick building, a combo of service garage and lorry drivers’ cafe.

  ‘There are some toilets round the back,’ Tammy muttered as they walked over there, passing numerous trucks and wagons, some old and some new, some with curtained interiors.

  When they reached the building, they circled round it, away from its glazed, brightly glowing frontage, passing a row of bins and a pile of spare but rusting auto-parts. At the very rear, two doors stood covered with flaking paint. One was marked ‘Gents’, the other ‘Ladies’.

  Two more girls were standing here, chatting as they smoked. One of them, a bottle-blonde in a fur coat and a preponderance of mascara, spotted them as they approached. Initially she looked shocked, but then she grinned,

  ‘And what happened to you, Tammy, love?’

  ‘What’s it look like?’ Tammy replied sulkily. ‘Some bastard threw a turd at me.’

  The bottle-blonde coughed cigarette smoke as she guffawed. ‘Oh my God … sorry, love, but rather you than me!’

  The other woman, who was older, grey-haired in fact, and considerably heavier – and thus looked awful in her matching red mini-dress and stilettos – seemed completely unmoved. She simply took in the night air, expelling streams of smoke through her flaring nostrils.

  ‘They were a lot of help,’ Lucy said when they’d entered the toilets, to which Tammy only grunted.

  The Ladies was a small, boxy room with white-tiled walls and a damp concrete floor. There were four cubicles, three of them marked “Out of Order”, and two large mirrors over two side-by-side washbasins. The mirrors were grubby and smeared. Across the top of each one, some past comedian had used a black marker-pen to offer his opinions on the unfortunate women who’d routinely imprint their faces in the glass below in order to fix their make-up. The one on the left read Blowjob Queen of Manchester!, and to ensure there was no misunderstanding, an arrow pointed downward. The one on the right was signposted: Takes it up the arse! Yukki
ty yuk!

  Lucy handed the face wipes over so that Tammy could clean herself, though it was already apparent that the girl was going to need to go home and take a shower. Throw enough shit and some of it will stick, as the old saying went – sometimes, as in Tammy’s case, in your hair as well.

  However, if Lucy had anticipated a range of expletives from the young hooker – and here in the stark white light of the drab toilet, she could see just how young she was, clearly not much more than twenty – she was to be disappointed.

  Tammy merely sighed to herself as she rubbed and scrubbed at her face, occasionally wrinkling her nostrils, accepting the odd bit of help from Lucy.

  ‘Digby’ll go spare if I go home without earning tonight,’ she muttered. Again, this was spoken matter-of-factly, without feeling, as if all this awfulness was simply routine.

  ‘We can probably get most of it off here,’ Lucy said, in attempted consolation.

  ‘Gimme a break, love. No john’s going to want to give me one now, is he? The first whiff he gets, he’ll chuck his tea up.’ Tammy continued scrubbing on her own. ‘Can’t believe we’re actually getting blamed for these murders now.’

  ‘Yeah, how about that,’ Lucy said.

  ‘You picked a good time to start out, I’ll tell you.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  ‘Don’t worry …’ Tammy actually managed to crack a smile.

  In the process of cleaning away the filth, she’d also removed most of her slap, but she was none the worse for that. She had rosebud lips, a snub nose, a dusting of freckles and a pair of fetching green eyes – there was something of the saucy minx about her. Lucy couldn’t help wondering how so pretty a youngster had finished up in this profession.

  ‘I’ve got just the thing for us,’ Tammy said. ‘Look in my bag.’

  Lucy did as instructed, and alongside Tammy’s purse found the vodka bottle. It was still half full.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Tammy said.

  ‘Nah …’ Lucy shrugged ‘I’m teetotal.’