Chris Simms - Shifting Skin

Rick saw the direction of Jon’s gaze. ‘A bit of homework. All these tests I do, it’s a hard habit to break.’

Jon sat down. ‘Any first impressions?’ he asked, turning his computer on.

Rick tipped his head to one side. ‘Not really. I just wanted to familiarise myself. But this second victim, Carol Miller, she seems to have been called in on a lot of evenings and weekends to cover the maternity ward.’

Jon shrugged. ‘That’s the nature of locum work, isn’t it? You’re on call for when the full-time staff cry off. Which is usually evenings and weekends.’

Rick tapped a biro on the pile of documents, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. ‘Her last twenty-four hours…She left the baby with her mum just after five in the afternoon, but she wasn’t on duty in Stepping Hill until seven. You don’t leave your baby two hours earlier than you need to, surely? Yet Carol Miller’s mum was under the impression her daughter had left to go directly to work. So what was she up to?’

Grudgingly, Jon admitted to himself that he was impressed. Of course, the discrepancy hadn’t escaped the investigating team. Many suspected Carol was hiding something. Attention had turned to her phone records. ‘That’s what a few of us are wondering. Maybe she just needed a break from the little one, but didn’t want to admit it.’ He opened his briefcase and took out a perspex folder. Inside was the card from the maternity ward’s noticeboard.

His first thought was to keep everything back from his new partner, at least until he could be certain if he was McCloughlin’s stooge or not. He glanced across the desk. Rick’s eyes were roving back and forth across a witness statement. Skim-reading

— something Jon couldn’t master, hard as he’d tried. Watching the younger officer absorbing information like a sponge, he suddenly felt threatened.

He looked at the card again, knowing that teamwork was far more effective.

‘I had a thought yesterday, sparked by something my missus said. Carol Miller was always trying to lose weight, but never very successfully. Then she got excited about something she’d spotted at work. Last night I checked the staff noticeboard on the maternity ward at Stepping Hill hospital. One of the midwives mentioned Carol had been talking about getting a rowing machine. I found this.’ He spun the postcard across the desk.

Rick trapped it under one hand and picked it up. ‘A rowing machine. Did you try the extension number?’

Jon shook his head, ‘I thought it might be more interesting to catch him face to face. His shift starts later this morning.’

By now the room was filling up with members of the investigating team. Behind their desks was McCloughlin’s private office, separated from the rest of the room by a flimsy partition wall. The phone on his desk began to ring.

‘Where’s the boss?’ asked Rick, the word sounding odd coming out of his mouth.

Jon shrugged as Rick got up. He skirted eagerly round his desk, stepped into the office and picked up the receiver. Far too keen, Jon thought, knowing he would now have to take a message. Turning his head slightly to the side, he listened to his new partner.

‘Hello. DCI McCloughlin’s phone…No, he’s in a meeting I think…Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know where the meeting is. Can I take. . Right, I see. Hang on.’ He now sounded totally flustered. ‘Jon? This guy’s insisting on talking to the SIO.’

Jon swivelled in his seat. ‘Who is it?’

‘The radio operator downstairs. Can you…?’ He held the phone out as if it was a piece of equipment he no longer knew how to operate.

‘DI Spicer here.’

‘Jon, it’s Sergeant Innes,’ voice sounding strained. ‘Who’s the tool that picked up the phone?’

‘My new partner.’

He heard an exasperated sigh. ‘Where’s McCloughlin?’

‘I don’t know. Have you tried his mobile?’

‘It’s switched off. A call’s come just come in from near a patch of waste ground by the Belle Vue Housing Offices. Are you near a box?’

‘Hang on.’ He transferred the call to the phone on his desk and turned to his computer screen. ‘I am now. Go ahead.’

‘Have a look at this FWIN.’

Jon typed the Force-Wide Incident Number in and the operations room report filled the screen. ‘Oh, shit, another body.’

‘Yes. Minus her outer layer — and I don’t mean clothes. I’ve told the nearest uniformed units to get over there and secure the scene. The major-incident wagon’s also on its way.’

Jon scanned through for the exact location of the incident.

‘Off Mount Road? I don’t believe it.’

Anger surged through him. The bodies were being dumped right on their doorstep, and Jon felt as if the killer was deliberately goading him. He felt his grip tightening on the telephone receiver. ‘OK, we’ll get over there. Leave a message on McCloughlin’s voicemail will you?’

Before he’d hung up, Rick was in his face. ‘Mount Road? Where’s that?’

‘Put it this way. With the traffic at the moment, it would probably be faster to walk there.’

Despite that, they drove, Jon anxiously listening to the police radio for any sign of McCloughlin’s whereabouts as they fought through the commuters clogging the A6, siren only slightly speeding their progress.

Finally they turned off the main road on to Kirkmanshulme Lane, only to join the end of a stationary queue of cars. The oncoming lane was just as choked, and Jon realised there was no way of cutting through. ‘Bollocks,’ he said, his fingers drumming angrily on the steering wheel.

Rick looked out of the side window. ‘Belle Vue. Strange name for such a grim-looking area.’

Jon glanced at his passenger, then at the surroundings beyond their windscreen. ‘Belle Vue? In its day this was the biggest leisure park in Britain. There was a zoo, complete with mangy lions and miserable bears, a huge roller coaster, boating lakes, dodgems, miniature steam railway. Even a speed-racing track.’

‘Where?’ asked Rick, twisting in his seat, trying to find evidence of what Jon had just described.

‘This whole area. The speedway track was over there, where that car auction site is. One of my earliest memories is of coming out here with my dad, getting sprayed with the red grit that the bikes used to kick up as they roared past. I used to wear a pair of old flying goggles to protect my eyes. They still race, but at the greyhound track nowadays. Of course, you’re not allowed to perch on the barriers at the bends any more.’

‘I bet there was hardly any trouble, either.’

Hearing the wistful note in his voice, Jon let out a short cough.

‘Don’t you believe it. There’s no harking back to a lost golden era with Manchester. The housing around this area was shocking — still is, in fact.’ He nodded at the road in front. ‘There are houses just up the road in Gorton on the market for five grand. Negative equity is alive and well around here. When the leisure park was first built it was surrounded by back-to-back terraces crammed in around the cotton factories and chemical works. Smoking chimneys, open drains, the stench from the knacker’s yards.’

‘You make it sound like a Lowry painting,’ Rick laughed, a note of disbelief in his voice.

Jon’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘That’s because it was, man. Lowry painted life as he saw it, no gloss. When my family first moved over here from Galway they lived in an area called Little Ireland in Ancoats. You’ve never heard of it?’

Looking a little bored, Rick shook his head.

‘Engels described it in his Condition of the Working Classes in England ,’ Jon replied, resisting the temptation to make a comment about his partner’s university education. ‘It was the worst slum he’d ever seen. Hundreds of Irish families shared cellars as their homes, slept on straw. You’re from Chester. Did you never learn about the region’s history at school?’