Paul Finch - Stalkers

‘What’s going on?’ she asked, as he climbed in.

‘First, I want proof that you’re who you say you are.’

She felt under her sweat top and produced a driving licence. From the ID and photograph, she was indeed Lauren Wraxford.

‘You’ve got bottle, Lauren, I’ll give you that,’ he said, as he switched the engine on and pulled away from the kerb. ‘You’ve also got a grievance. I reckon the very least I can do is buy you a cup of coffee.’

Heck pulled off the A580 on the outskirts of Manchester, into a bustling lorry park, where he halted, climbed out and headed on foot to a scruffy cafe sandwiched between a mountain of old tyres and a dilapidated shed with a sign over its lintel reading ‘TOILET’. Lauren got out as well, and leaned against the bonnet of the car as she watched him.

In his jeans, sweater and leather jacket, her chaperon didn’t look much like a cop, though she supposed he was a little more presentable now than he had been the previous night, when he’d been drunk and dishevelled and acting like a smartarse in that crappy London pub. Mind you, she supposed she’d looked a bit of a sight herself, dolled up like a teenage hooker.

She glanced over her shoulder into his car. A mass of paperwork had spilled from a zip folder on the back seat. It would be so easy just to stick her head in there and have a quick scan through it — but he might catch her and she didn’t want that. For the moment, she needed to keep him on side. Last night, she’d even have let him take her back to his pad and screw her, if that was what he’d wanted. She’d believed that firmly at the time, and she still believed it now. That was how desperate she was to learn more about his investigation. Hell, it might even have been a pleasure. He wasn’t unfanciable, in a rumpled, hard-bitten sort of way, though in truth Lauren rarely had time for love. Even when things were going well — and it was a long time since she’d been able to say that — sex was a purely mechanical process for her, designed to satisfy an urgent physical need. She’d had several lovers before, even a couple of proper boyfriends, but if there’d been anything deep and meaningful there, it had slipped past her.

‘How’s the leg?’ Heck asked, returning with two lidded Styrofoam beakers.

Lauren realised that she’d been rubbing at it. ‘It’ll be okay. Banged my knee on the steering column when I crashed.’

He handed her a coffee. ‘Seriously … you’d better report that van stolen as soon as you can, or you’re going to get locked up.’

‘Won’t they check for prints, and see there are none there but mine?’

‘They won’t swab an old donkey-wagon like that for a minor offence like TWOC.’ He glanced at her. ‘I mean … so long as there’s nothing in it that shouldn’t be there.’

‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing.’

He leaned next to her on the car, sipping his own drink, watching the afternoon traffic shunt noisily past. ‘So your family sent you to find your sister?’

Lauren sighed. ‘Not really. My family is basically my mum, Angel.’

‘That’s her name?’

‘Yep.’ Fleetingly, Lauren almost sounded scornful. ‘Angel by name, angel by nature. She didn’t want me to come at all. She said we should leave it to you lot.’

‘Sounds like a sensible woman.’

‘Oh, she’s dead sensible, my mum.’ Lauren sipped at her coffee. ‘So sensible that even though she’s white, she married a black bloke back in the 1970s. Any idea what that meant back then — living in East Leeds?’

Heck pondered. ‘Can’t have been easy. But what does your dad think about this adventure you’ve embarked on?’

‘Nothing. He was killed in an accident working on the railway … six years after they got wed. Left my mum to bring up two mixed-race kids on her own, on one of the roughest estates you’ve ever seen. And with no help from either side of the family, who, surprise-surprise, didn’t want anything to do with her anymore.’

At one time Lauren would have been too embarrassed to elaborate on some of the things she’d experienced in her earliest youth: seeing her mother have to clean words written in excrement off their council flat door every morning. At the time the words had held no meaning for her, but the little girl had been able to read them and had stored them in her memory until she was older, and now there was no doubt in her mind about what phrases like ‘white niggers’ meant.

‘You know,’ she said. ‘One day we received a letter put together with clippings of newspaper type. It went something like: “Watch out, because next I’m getting a wog or a wog lover. Signed … the Yorkshire Ripper.” Mum took it to the police, but they told her to ignore it, saying it was nothing more than a joke. A joke … for a single mum and two young daughters living on their own in that wasteland. Some joke, eh?’

‘ Pretty grim,’ Heck acknowledged. ‘No wonder you and Genene were close.’

‘Well … we weren’t as close as we perhaps could have been.’

‘Whatever, your Genene did very well to get to uni after a start in life like that.’

‘That was Mum’s doing.’ Again, Lauren almost sounded resentful. ‘She set us the best example she could. After Dad died, she took on two jobs — sitting on a supermarket till all day and checking coats at a nightclub in the evening — just so we didn’t want for anything. She pushed us at school as well. Insisted we be polite and ladylike, that we ignore the taunts and hatred around us. I freely admit Genene managed it better than I did …’

Lauren’s words faded, and this time she declined to elaborate further, not mentioning how when it was her own turn to be encouraged to attend school on time, to look smart in her uniform and deliver her homework promptly, Angel Wraxford had aged prematurely, stress and chain-smoking turning her into a pathetic shadow of the creature she’d once been; and how, as such, there hadn’t been quite as much support for the younger sister as there had for the older.

‘Anyway,’ Lauren said decidedly. ‘Enough of this boring crap about me. It’s Genene I’m interested in. You’re saying there’s absolutely nothing about this you can tell me?’

Heck shrugged. ‘Only that the disappearance is being investigated.’

‘Just by you, or by others as well?’

‘Every case has an adequate number of investigators attached.’

‘So where are the rest of them?’

‘We all have different duties …’

‘Can’t you give me a straight answer?’ She was visibly struggling to stop herself getting irate again. ‘All you’re doing is taking me round the houses.’

‘Look … I wish I could tell you there was a whole team of us.’

She nodded, having suspected this all along. ‘And why isn’t there?’

‘Finance, politics.’ He sipped tiredly at his coffee. ‘All the usual reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with fighting crime.’

‘And what’s your gut feeling? I mean, you’re at the heart of this. Do you know what happened to Genene?’

‘No.’

‘She can’t have just vanished.’

‘People vanish all the time, Lauren. Police stations up and down the country are crammed with “missing persons” reports.’

‘How many of them do you recover?’

‘Some.’

‘Some?’

‘A few.’

‘A minority?’

‘Okay, a minority. But there are others who come back of their own accord.’

‘And how many of those who never come back are the victims of foul play?’

He shrugged again.

‘All of them, maybe?’ she wondered.

‘Possibly.’

‘And what are we talking here? Per annum, I mean. Hundreds? Thousands?’