Paula nodded, pushing her hair back from her face. ‘Hi. Sorry. I’m DC McIntyre. I just put my head down for five minutes … ’
‘I know who you are, pet.’ The accent was from the North East, the cadences blunted from years spent elsewhere. ‘No need to apologise. I know what it’s like when you’re in the thick of it. Some weeks, you wonder if your bed was only a dream.’
‘Thanks for coming in. I didn’t expect you to give up your Saturday night.’
‘I thought it was easier to come in. And besides, my husband and my two lads are off to Sunderland for the late kick-off game, they’ll not be back till gone eleven by the time they’ve had their post-match curry. So all you’re keeping me from is crap telly. What Bryant had to say sounded a lot more interesting. Care to fill in the blanks?’ DS Dean settled herself comfortably in Chris Devine’s desk chair and propped her boot heels on the bin. Paula tried not to mind.
Slightly wary of the Vice cop’s obvious interest, Paula explained Tony’s theory as best she could then smiled apologetically. ‘The thing with Dr Hill is that his ideas can sound … ’
‘Stark staring mad?’
Paula chuckled. ‘Pretty much. But I’ve worked with him for long enough now to know that it’s kind of spooky how often he gets things right on the money.’
‘I’ve heard he’s good,’ Dean said. ‘They say that’s part of the reason Carol Jordan has such a great success rate.’
Paula bristled. ‘Don’t underestimate the chief. She’s a helluva detective.’
‘I’m sure she is. But we can all use a bit of help now and again. And that’s the reason I’m here. Whenever other detectives are interested in my turf, it’s time to take a personal interest. None of us wants our carefully cultivated contacts rubbed up the wrong way.’
Now that Dean had laid out her stall, Paula felt more comfortable in her presence. ‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘So, can you help me?’
Dean dug into the pocket of her jeans and took out a memory stick. ‘I’ll share what I can. Bryant said you were interested in new lasses?’
‘That’s right. I hear there are more new faces because of the recession.’
‘That’s true, but a lot of them are inside workers, not on the street. How new are you interested in?’
‘A month before the killings began?’
‘I like to keep my ear to the ground,’ Dean said, digging into the pocket of her jeans and coming out with a smartphone. ‘I also don’t like putting anything on the computer that doesn’t have to be there. Especially when it comes to vulnerable young women.’ She fiddled with the phone then gave a grunt of satisfaction.
‘There’s no hard and fast way of dealing with the crap out on the streets,’ Dean said, thumbing through a list. ‘It’s all a bit ad hoc, you might say. When new faces show up, we try and get alongside them. Sometimes a little bit of leaning is all it takes, you know? Especially with the more or less respectable ones. A mention of how a criminal record will fuck up everything from their childcare to their credit rating and you can see the wheels going round. But that’s a tiny minority. Once they’ve got as far as walking down that street, there’s mostly no going back. So what I’m looking for there is to develop sources. And just to keep an eye out, you know?’
‘Nobody wants bodies turning up.’
‘Aye, well, I like to think we mostly manage to step in before it gets that far. My bonny lads tell me I’m living in cloud cuckoo land. But at least I try to get their names and a bit of background so we know what to put on the toe-tag, if it comes to it.’
‘So what are we looking at here?’
‘Forty-four square miles of BMP force area. Nine hundred thousand population, give or take. At any given time, there’s somewhere around a hundred and fifty women working as prostitutes. When you think that about fifty per cent of men admit to having paid for sex, them lasses are working bloody hard for a living.’
‘Not much of a living, either,’ Paula said.
‘Enough to keep them in drugs so they don’t care what they’re doing to earn the money for the next fix.’ Dean shook her head. ‘I bloody hope I’ve brought my lads up with a better attitude to women, that’s all I can say.’ She took her feet off the bin and sat up straight. ‘The time frame you’re looking at, I’ve got three names for you.’
‘I’m just glad it’s not more than that.’
‘We’re getting into summer time. The nights are lighter and the punters are more wary of being recognised when they’re kerb crawling.’
‘I never thought of prostitution as being seasonal.’
‘Just the street stuff, pet. Indoors goes like a fair all year round. If you were interested in indoor, this list would be more like a dozen. So here we go. Tiffany Sedgwick, Lateesha Marlow and Kerry Fletcher.’
Paula couldn’t believe her luck. ‘Did you say Kerry Fletcher?’ she said, excitement quickening in her.
‘Does that ring a bell?’
‘Kerry Fletcher’s female?’
Dean looked at her as if she’d lost the plot. ‘Of course she’s female. You didn’t ask me about rent boys. Why? Does the name mean something?’
‘It came up earlier in a different part of the inquiry. Given the context, we thought it was a bloke. Kerry, it could be a bloke’s name.’ She frowned. ‘That makes no sense.’
Dean smiled. ‘You can check it out for yourself. You’ll find her most nights down the bottom end of Campion Way. Near the roundabout.’
‘Do you know anything about her?’ Paula scribbled the name in her notebook, opening up her email program and starting to type a note to Stacey.
‘I know what she told me about herself. How much truth there is, who knows? They all make stuff up. Good stuff and bad stuff. Whatever they need to feel all right about themselves.’
‘So what did Kerry tell you?’ Paula liked a bit of job-related chit-chat as much as anyone, but right now the only thing she was interested in was Kerry Fletcher.
‘Well, she’s a local lass. I suspect that bit’s true, because she’s got a broad Bradfield accent. She was born in Toxteth Road, round the back of the high flats in Skenby.’
Paula nodded. She knew Toxteth Road. What the local cops said was that even the dogs went round mob-handed down there. It was also in the area Stacey had identified from the number plates. ‘Desolation Row,’ she said.
‘Bang on. Then when she was five or six, they moved to a sixteenth-floor flat. And that was that for her mother. She never left the flat from the day they moved in. Kerry’s not sure if it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia or fear of Eric – that’s the dad. But whatever it was, she became a prisoner in her own home.’ The sergeant paused for dramatic effect. It was clear that she relished her stories.
‘And that made her the perfect bargaining chip for Eric Fletcher,’ Dean continued. ‘He began sexually abusing Kerry when she was about eight. If she didn’t do exactly as she was told, Eric took it out on her mother. He’d batter her, or push her out on the balcony and leave her there till she was a gibbering wreck. And little Kerry loved her mum.’
Paula sighed. She’d heard variations on this tale so many times, but every time had the force of the first time. She couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like to feel so powerless. To endure a poverty of experience that meant this was a child’s only exemplar of love. When that was all you knew, how could you believe anything else was achievable? The relationships you saw on TV shows must have felt as fantastical as Hogwarts. ‘Of course she did,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t she? Until she learned to despise her.’