Neil White - LOST SOULS

Egan started to show interest. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw her neck before the doctor arrived, and there were a lot of marks, as if she had been strangled over and over.’

‘What, you mean sex games? You know, strangle, release, strangle, release?’

Laura thought she saw a twinkle of excitement in his eyes. ‘Can’t say I do,’ she replied, weary of cops who saw the quick thrill in everything. ‘She died in her clothes. If it was kinky, it was shy kinky.’

Egan pursed his lips and looked away.

‘And there was something else.’

Egan turned back, his eyebrows raised. ‘Go on.’

Laura glanced at Pete. ‘She’s missing her eyes and tongue.’

‘What do you mean, “missing her eyes and tongue”?’

‘It means that she hasn’t fucking got them any more,’ said Pete, his voice rich with sarcasm. ‘What do you think it means, that she left them on top of the fridge or something?’

Egan spun around, eyes angry, so Laura interrupted. ‘She was tied to a chair, and her eyes and tongue have been cut out.’

Egan continued to stare at Pete, who just stared back. Eventually Egan turned away. He sighed and then began to chew at his lip. Laura sensed that he had just seen this investigation stretching a long way into the future.

‘I bet you could do without this,’ said Pete to Egan, as he raised his eyebrows at Laura. ‘On top of the abductions, I mean.’

Egan’s top lip twitched.

Laura looked down and tried not to smirk. She had quickly figured out that Egan’s eyes were on the career ladder. She had seen his type before: delegate everything and then take all the credit. Look pert and enthusiastic in strategy meetings and then ditch the work onto others. She could guess why Pete hadn’t climbed very far.

‘Is it drugs?’ asked Egan, looking around, trying to change the subject. ‘Some kind of revenge attack?’

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Laura said. She was new to Blackley, but she knew enough to know that this wasn’t a drug neighbourhood. It was full of new-build town-houses, all shiny red bricks, narrow paths and neat double glazing, brightened up with cottage fascias and potted plants. It was a first-time-buyer estate. Drug dealers don’t bother with the housing ladder; they stay low until they can move really high. ‘I checked with intel half an hour ago, and she’s not on our radar. Just a nice, quiet girl, so the neighbours say.’

‘How was she discovered?’

Laura and Pete exchanged glances before Laura replied, ‘The call came around four this morning. Some old boy, Eric Randle, said he went round to check on her. He found her tied to a chair, dead.’

‘Went round to check, at four in the morning?’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Laura raised her eyebrows. ‘Said he’d had a dream.’

Egan smiled, almost in relief. ‘This sounds like a quick one.’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ she said. ‘I saw the body, and I saw him, and he doesn’t seem a likely. But he doesn’t have an alibi.’ Laura thought back to the meeting she’d had with the old man. He hadn’t spoken much, seemed in shock.

‘So is he suspect or witness?’ asked Egan, watching her carefully.

‘Suspect. Everyone is, this early into it.’

‘So did you arrest him?’

Laura noticed the tone of Egan’s voice, slow and deliberate, making sure it had been her decision. He would stand by her only if it looked like she had got it right.

She paused for a moment, thought about what they had in the way of evidence. The old man had been visibly upset, but Laura had checked him out for wounds or scratch marks. Nothing. His clothes had been seized, to check for blood-spray, and he’d agreed to a DNA swab, for elimination purposes she’d told him, along with his fingernail clippings, but nothing in her instincts told her that he was the killer.

‘No,’ she said, after a moment. ‘He’s of interest, but no more than that.’

Egan nodded, a thin smile on his lips, and then headed up the path towards the front door.

‘Crime scenes are still in there,’ she shouted.

Egan stopped, looked back at her. Laura thought he appeared irritated, as if she had somehow insulted him. Before he had a chance to speak, a uniformed officer appeared at her shoulder.

‘We’ve got a neighbour who says she heard something last night.’

Egan looked over and then moved back down the path towards them.

‘Who is it?’

The uniform pointed behind him to a house a few doors away, at the edge of the cul-de-sac. On the doorstep stood a woman in her fifties, wrapped in a quilted dressing gown, her hair messy and eyes bright with fear.

‘What’s she got?’ Egan barked the questions, sounding impatient.

‘She says she heard a car leave very late, well after midnight. It had been parked at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. A nice car, Audi TT, navy blue. When it left, it screeched away.’

‘Did she get the number?’

The uniform held up a scrap of paper. ‘Not last night. But she remembered it this morning when she saw the police arrive because it was one of those personal ones.’

Egan looked down at the piece of paper and grinned. ‘We need to do a vehicle check on this.’

The uniform smiled. Already done it.’

Egan pursed his lips a couple of times, like a nervous tic, and then asked, ‘Who’s the keeper?’

‘Someone called Luke King.’

‘Is he known to us?’

‘His father is.’

‘Go on.’ Egan was sounding impatient again.

‘He’s Jimmy King.’

Egan looked like he’d been slapped.

‘Who is he?’ Laura whispered to Pete.

Pete sighed. ‘Some would say a local businessman, one of the most successful in Lancashire.’

‘And what would others say?’

‘The most ruthless and sadistic person they have ever come across.’

She was going to ask Pete something else when she noticed that Egan had started to pace. She sensed that if Egan was about to feel the strain, she was about to get even busier.

It was over an hour before anyone else showed up at Sam’s office. It was the same most mornings, quiet until just after eight. He preferred it that way normally, away from the office chatter, but it was different this morning. He was edgy, troubled by the old man outside the office. Every time he looked out of the window, he was there, staring up, watching him work.

And Sam was trying to work. The early-morning office time was important. Being a criminal lawyer could be a full day. All-day courts and all-night police stations, with clients and witnesses to see in between. Sam had a diary full of appointments, although he knew most of those wouldn’t attend. They’d turn up instead on their trial dates, expecting him to defend them when they hadn’t even bothered to tell him their story.

So the early morning was when Sam caught up, the office fresh with the smell of furniture polish after the attentions of the dawn cleaner. He briefed counsel, compiled witness statements from a jumble of notes, or dictated the stream of correspondence demanded by the Legal Services Commission.

The younger lawyers did it differently. They went for visible overtime, working late into the evening, hoping to be noticed. But it made no difference. Only one thing mattered, and that was the figures. How much money was made. No one asked when it was made.

At Parsons & Co, whatever problem needed sorting, there was always a lawyer willing to bill you for it. Crime had always been Sam’s thing, but when Harry Parsons had started out, he’d done everything from divorces to fighting evictions. As the firm grew, it sprouted departments. The criminal department was the most precarious, because the work was so unpredictable. Police budget cuts could lead to fewer arrests, or if a lawyer upset one of the bigger criminal families the department would find itself with fewer clients. The claims department was the money-spinner. It used to help people who called into the office, victims of real accidents. Now it just handled referrals from those claims farmers who advertised on television, the promise of free money slotted in between debt-firm commercials, and now the lawyers settled claims for people they never met.