Neil White - LOST SOULS

Yusuf nodded. ‘Logging calls, making lists of suspects, trying to cross-reference them. Speaking to the families, just listening out for something.’

‘But there wasn’t much to hear?’

He shook his head. ‘No common theme, except that the kids were from bad families.’

Laura took hold of the binder, and as she flicked through the papers she saw that it contained intelligence reports, all hole-punched and inserted precisely.

‘I’ve put them in chronological order,’ he said.

Laura’s eyes twinkled with amusement. She’d already guessed that he probably had.

‘If you want me to get anything else for you, just ask,’ Yusuf continued, and then he blushed as she smiled back.

‘Thanks. I’d like that.’ She was about to walk away when she thought of something. ‘What are you doing on this case?’ she asked.

‘Calling friends of the victim,’ he said. ‘I break the news, and when they calm down I ask about her other friends, ex-boyfriends, new boyfriends, that kind of thing. Each call leads to another person, and I research every name I come across.’

‘Any other suspects?’

Yusuf shook his head. ‘Not yet. She led a quiet life. Not many boyfriends, and no one on the scene at the moment, although her friends think there may have been someone getting close to her.’

‘Did any know Eric Randle?’

‘I didn’t ask specifically, but a few mentioned that she was a member of a club, used to meet every week, but no one knew much about it, as if she was embarrassed to talk about it.’

Laura picked up the file and nodded her thanks. Back at her desk, she started to read.

The first item was an intelligence report from the eighties. It was a warning that Eric Randle was a problem caller, that he would call the police with information, often about murders or missing children, not always local. He was warned off a few times because he got in the way, turned up at crime scenes, but over time he was regarded as a harmless nuisance and left alone.

Laura leafed through a number of incident logs, created when Eric Randle called the police to provide information. They sounded vague, usually just some idea that someone was in danger. Most had ended with a quiet warning not to meddle.

She looked up when she sensed Egan enter the room. She could hear Pete still sounding off about Randle. Egan didn’t say anything. He just listened, and then began to walk around the room asking if anyone had found anything new.

Laura looked back at the folder, and then she saw something that made her forget all about Egan.

Eric Randle had briefly been a suspect in a couple of prostitute murders around fifteen years earlier. Two girls had gone missing from their usual beat, last seen getting into a dark-coloured saloon. They were found on some waste-ground near to the motorway, both stabbed and mutilated. The killer didn’t strike again, certainly not in Blackley, and the police thought that the attacker was maybe part of the travelling crowd. But they started to look at Eric Randle because he had called the police and told them things that they hadn’t released to the press. He would have been arrested, but he didn’t fit the profile. He was too old and had no criminal history.

The killer was still at large.

Laura put the file down and thought about that. Profiling was big back then—the Cracker years—and maybe too much weight was attached to it. Profiles never caught anyone. They just eliminated people, and sometimes they were wrong. She made a note to find the file for that case.

Then the next part of the file made her jolt, just as Egan started to walk over to her desk. She put her head down and began to read, just to make sure she had seen it right. She had. A different case, a different time.

She put the folder down and sat back, thinking hard about what she had just read. Five years ago, Eric Randle had been charged with murder.

The light around Harry’s doorframe glowed along the dark corridor. Sam tapped lightly and went in.

He saw Harry sitting behind his large mahogany desk. It gleamed, dominating the room with its leather top and ornately carved legs. The room was decorated like a Victorian parlour, the wallpaper gold with burgundy stripes, broken up by caricatures of famous judges and paintings of the Lancashire countryside.

Harry stood up when Sam entered, his shock of curly white hair sticking up from his head, his face deeply tanned, the frequent visits to his Spanish villa making him look weathered and kind. It was a disguise. Sam knew Harry was ruthless, determined and cold in all things. He dressed smartly for someone of his age, though. He was a couple of years over sixty, and he wore dark three-pieces, his stomach only just bulging the buttons, with hand-made shirts framing bright silk ties, a flourish above his waistcoat. And he always wore brogues.

Sam had followed him into brogues, but not the three-pieces. Sam went for single-breasted suits, dark and simple. His hair was shorter than Harry’s, cut down to a number two, his way of hiding the shrinking hairline and the flashes of grey appearing at the sides. Sam’s early-morning walks kept the weight off, but the job gave him blood pressure that scared his doctor.

‘Hello, Sam, good to see you.’ Harry smiled, but it was quick, functional, lacking in warmth. His voice was nasal, almost a whine. It could wear a court down to his way of thinking pretty quickly.

Sam smiled back, a quick nod. ‘Mr Parsons.’ It was only ‘Harry’ at home, never at work.

There were two other people in the room. Sam recognised one straightaway. Jimmy King. They had met a few times, at family events, but it was his reputation that marked him out, ruthless and rich, the first producing the latter. He was dressed in black pinstripes, his hair swept back and dark. Sam wasn’t convinced it was natural. When Jimmy smiled his teeth looked bright, too clean.

The other man was much younger, and looked quiet and nervous.

Sam knew Jimmy was a childhood friend of Harry’s. He’d heard the story too many times, how they had both grown up in the same children’s home, a dusty old Victorian building, forgotten by their parents, beaten by their carers. They had grown up tough, and so Harry and Jimmy had made a pact, and that was never to be beaten, to always look after the other, and to show everyone that they could rise to the very top despite their poor start.

Harry had gone to university to study law, his first exposure to the middle classes. He scraped his way through on student grants and part-time jobs, and then returned to Blackley with a new accent and a dream of his own practice. Jimmy had gone too, but he found his studies hard. He realised something else, though: that there was money in property, and students needed property. So he dropped out of university, borrowed money and bought a house. He filled it with students, crammed in like inmates, and when the rent started coming in he bought another. When Jimmy returned to Blackley he had ten houses and a desire to buy up the town that had treated him so badly.

Harry and Jimmy had remained close, inseparable. Harry had even invited Jimmy to Sam’s wedding, but business commitments had kept him away. Jimmy had sent his apologies and a crystal bowl. It was still in a cupboard somewhere.

Sam could tell that this was more than a social occasion. Something big was happening. He could see it in the way Jimmy and Harry exchanged glances, knowing and wary.

Jimmy King moved towards Sam, his hand outstretched, a disarming smile telling Sam that Jimmy was in charge. ‘How is the beautiful Helena?’ he boomed, his Lancashire accent strong, although Sam knew it varied, depending on the audience.