The Business Of Dying

Part Two. HUNTING THE LIVING
8

'Miriam Ann Fox, aged eighteen, died from a single stab wound to the neck delivered from behind. The wound was almost two inches deep, suggesting that it was a) a very sharp bladed knife, and b) a very strong person delivering the fatal blow. From the angle of the wound we can surmise that the perpetrator was considerably taller than her. She was five feet three; he, and I think we can safely assume it was a he in this case, is almost certainly between five feet ten inches and six feet two. The victim either bled or choked to death as a result of this one wound. The pathologist thinks that the perpetrator held her up while she choked and died, then laid her out on the ground on her back, before stabbing her four times in the vaginal area.'

'So he didn't have sex with her then?' asked one of the assembled group.

It was 8.35 the following morning and Malik, me, and the fourteen other detectives assigned to the Miriam Fox murder hunt were sitting in the incident room while DCI Knox, the official head of the investigation, stood next to a whiteboard giving his summary of what we knew so far. Welland sat next to him, but was once again not looking himself. If someone had asked me for a diagnosis of his condition I would have said his batteries had gone flat, which seems to happen more and more to coppers of a certain age, and I wondered briefly how much longer he was going to last on the Force.

No such concerns about Knox, who was a big charismatic guy with a deep, resonant voice that swept across the room. 'There's no evidence that she had sex either immediately prior to or immediately after her death,' he continued. 'According to the pathologist she died at some point between eight and ten on Sunday night. Now we've spoken to a number of the girls who work the area and she was seen by at least two of them at about eight p.m., which was when she generally started her shift. She spoke briefly to one of the girls, and the girl said that there was nothing untoward about her. She then moved down the street to her usual spot, which is the corner of Northdown and Collier Street, and from there she was picked up by a car – a dark blue saloon, we haven't got the make yet – and driven away. Usually the girls try to get the number of the cars but, sod's law, no-one did this time.'

There was a resigned murmur from the assembled men, including me. You don't expect to get too many lucky breaks in the course of your work, but on a case like this you need a few.

Knox paused to take a sip from his tea. 'They didn't drive very far though, as we know. The victim was killed at the spot where she was found. As the crow flies that's no more than a few hundred yards from where she was picked up. It's important we trace this car. We've got a dozen uniforms who are going to be doing house-to-house in the vicinity to see if anyone can remember seeing a vehicle fitting the description near the scene. If we're lucky' – more groans – 'somebody might even have got a look at him. He would have been heavily bloodstained after the killing. We're checking CCTV on every possible site from where she was picked up to where she was discovered, but so far nothing's turned up.'

'None of the toms recognized the car, then?' asked Capper, who was a DS, the same as me. I didn't like Capper; never had. He had an unpleasant haircut and constant bad breath, but I wouldn't have held those things against him particularly, not on their own. It was the way he sucked up to senior management I didn't like.

Knox shrugged. 'They see a lot of dark-coloured saloons in their line of business so no-one remembers this one.'

'You said that the toms tended to make notes of punters' registration plates.' It was me speaking this time.

'That's right.'

'Do they ever keep records of them?'

He shook his head. 'No, it doesn't appear so, not according to any of the girls who were spoken to last night. We still might get the number, though. We'll be appealing for information on Crimestoppers and in the area itself. Boards'll be going up round there this morning, so someone's memory might get jogged. We need to find out if she had any punters who she went with on a regular basis. Most of them usually do. We've got two statements from girls testifying that she was picked up on more than one occasion by someone in a red TVR, although no-one ever saw his face. Apparently she had a friend, a girl by the name of Molly Hagger, who used to work the streets with her – I believe you've got a photo of her, Dennis – but she hasn't been seen for several weeks.'

I felt a brief stab of fear. So that was her name. Molly. And now she was missing. 'There was a photograph of her with the victim at the victim's flat,' I said. 'It looked recent, so I think it would be useful to talk to this Molly.'

'If we can find her.'

'Have we got an address for her?' I asked.

Knox nodded. 'We think so. One of the girls said she thought she was staying at Coleman House. It's a council-run children's home over towards Camden. We haven't contacted anyone down there yet so I want you and Malik to pay the place a visit and see if you can find out where she is, and if any of the other people there have any information on the victim.'

I nodded. 'Sure.'

'We've also got to bring in the victim's pimp, who we've now identified as Mark Wells. Dennis met him briefly yesterday.' He looked across at me and winked, much to the amusement of everyone else. 'Wells has a long record of violence, including attacks on women, and at the very least we can bring him in for taking out DS Milne.'

Again there was more laughter. I managed a strained smile to show that I could take a joke, just like the next man; not that I felt much like laughing. My face still hurt and a darkening bruise had appeared under my right cheekbone overnight.

'We're applying for a search warrant for his house and a warrant for his arrest, both of which should be with us by mid-morning. We're going to lean on him hard. He's a cocky bastard by all accounts, but he's going to have useful information about the victim, and it's essential we extract it from him. He's also a suspect. So far, our only evidence of sexual assault is the stab wounds around the vagina, so it's quite possible that the killer's attempting to make it look like a sexual assault when, in reality, it wasn't his prime motivation. Now I don't want to put too much stock on that theory, because at the moment it is just a theory, but we've got to bear it in mind. And that means taking a close look at Mark Wells.'

He paused again, took another sip of his tea. 'We also need the names of everyone in a three-mile radius of here who's been picked up for soliciting at any time in the last two years, giving particular preference to anyone with convictions for violence or sex offences. And we're going to need to interview them all.' Several people groaned, and Knox managed an understanding smile. 'Look, it's not going to be easy – it never is – but we've got to explore every possible avenue, and that means talking to the sort of people who could have done this, i.e. men who are known to be violent to women. This murder hunt is twenty-four hours old, ladies and gentlemen. At the moment the body's still warm but it's going to cool down fast, so we've got a lot of work to do. One hell of a lot. I want this killer brought to justice and I know you're the people to do it.' He accompanied this last sentence by enthusiastically whacking one of the desks with the palm of his hand, which was a very Knox-like gesture. I'm sure sometimes he thought he was working on Wall Street.

Brave words, too. Whether they'd be matched by deeds or not, though, remained to be seen.

The remainder of the meeting was spent organizing who was going to be doing what, and took about ten minutes, including questions. Welland was going to be leading the raid on Mark Wells's place as soon as the paperwork came through, which annoyed me a little bit. Since it had been me the bastard had hit, I wanted to be on the team which brought him in, but I suppose at the same time I also wanted to find out more about Molly, and it was going to be difficult to do both.

It was 9.20 when Malik and I left to go round to the Coleman House care home. Times were hard in our division of the Metropolitan Police and budgets tight, so we decided to save the taxpayers some money by taking the bus. In the end, though, it would probably have been quicker to walk. An accident on the Holloway Road had snarled up the traffic and we were stuck in it, stopping and starting, for what seemed like hours.

I told Malik about my dream as we sat there watching the world go by, or not as the case might be. It had genuinely rattled me. 'You know, I know it sounds stupid, but it was almost like some sort of premonition.'

He couldn't resist a grin. 'What? You think Les Dennis might be in danger?'

'I'm serious, Asif. This wasn't like any dream I've ever had. You know me. I'm not superstitious, and I'm not spiritual or anything like that. I'm not even a Christian. So it's nothing to do with my state of mind. It was just it was so vivid that when I woke up I was absolutely positive this Molly girl was dead.'

'Explain the dream to me again.'

I went through it all with him, missing out the details of the dead customs men, and whispering so that none of the other passengers, a mixture of old grannies and foreign students, could hear what I was saying. I didn't want them thinking I was some sort of nutter.

By the time I'd finished, we'd travelled the sum total of about thirty yards.

Malik shook his head and gave me the sort of look that suggested he thought it was grossly unfair that he should be taking orders from someone with such a tenuous grip on reality. 'Look, Sarge, I wouldn't worry about it. You know, a dream's just a dream. The chances are this girl's all right.'

'I hope so. I didn't like the sound of the fact that she hasn't been seen for a couple of weeks.'

'Only by the local streetwalkers. Maybe she's changed. Maybe she's realized that prostitution and drug addiction is no way to lead a life.'

I laughed. 'Do you really believe that?'

'Well, it's unlikely…'

'Dead right it is.'

'But it's possible. And anyway, maybe she's just plying her trade somewhere else. There's got to be more chance of that than of her being dead in a ditch somewhere.'

Malik said these last few words a bit too loudly and a couple of people turned round and gave us funny looks.

'Yeah, you're right,' I said. 'You've convinced me.'

But he hadn't.

We exited the bus on Junction Road when it became obvious that we weren't getting anywhere and took the tube, which thankfully was still running pretty much as normal. It was 10.20 when we got out of Camden station. It was slowly turning into a sunny winter's day, so we walked the rest of the way.

Coleman House was a large redbrick Victorian building on a road just off the high street. One of the third-floor windows was boarded up, but other than that it looked quite well kept. A couple of kids, a boy and a girl, sat on the wall in front of the entrance, smoking and looking shifty. The girl was wearing a very short skirt and a huge pair of black platform-soled trainers that, set against her spindly legs, made her look mutated. They both looked at us as we approached and the boy sneered. 'Are you coppers?' he said.

'That's right,' I told him, stopping in front of them. 'We're investigating a murder.'

'Oh yeah? Whose, then?' he asked, looking interested. Morbid little bastard.

'Well, why don't we start with you telling me your name?'

'What's it got to do with me? I haven't done nothing.'

'You can't make him give you his name,' said the girl confidently, looking me in the eye. I put her at about thirteen, and she would have been quite pretty except for the angry cluster of whiteheads around her mouth and the excessive use of cheap make-up. Thirteen, and she was already a barrack-room lawyer. I had a feeling they were all going to be like that in a place like this.

'I'm not trying to,' I told her. 'I'm just interested in knowing who I'm talking to.'

'If you want to talk to him, you need an appropriate adult present.'

'So, when did you graduate from law school then, young lady?'

She was about to come up with some other smart-alec answer but we were interrupted before she could get it out.

'Can I help you, gentlemen?'

The speaker was an attractive white female, early forties. Quite tall – about five feet nine – and, from the sound of her voice, someone in authority.

I turned in her direction and smiled, opening fire with the charm. 'I hope so. My name's DS Milne and this is my colleague, DC Malik. We're here as part of an ongoing inquiry.'

She managed a weak smile. 'Really, what now?'

'It's a murder investigation.'

'Oh.' She looked taken aback. 'Was there any reason why you were talking to the children?'

'I was just introducing myself.'

'No you weren't,' said the girl. 'He was trying to find out who we were.'

'Well, I'll take over from here, Anne. Aren't you and John meant to be with Amelia?'

'We're just having a quick smoke,' said the girl, not bothering to look up.

'Perhaps you'd better come inside, gentlemen, and we'll talk in there.'

I nodded. 'Of course. And you are?'

'Carla Graham. I manage Coleman House.'

'Well, then, please lead the way,' I said, and we followed her through the double doors and into the building.

The place had the unwelcoming feel of a hospital: high ceilings; linoleum floors; health-related posters on the walls warning against shared needles, unwanted pregnancy, and a whole host of other obstacles to a happy and fulfilling life. And there was a nasty reek of disinfectant in the air. Dr Barnardo's this wasn't.

Carla Graham had a spacious office at the other end of the building. She ushered us in and we took seats facing her across her sizeable desk. There were more doom-mongering posters in here as well. One showed a huge photograph of a young child, no more than five, covered in bruises. The caption above it read: Stamp on Child Abuse. Below the photograph it added: Not on Children.

'So, what's happened?' Carla asked. 'I hope none of our clients are involved.'

'Clients, meaning children?' It was Malik asking the question.

'That's right.'

'We don't really know, which is why we're here.' I then told her about the discovery of the body the previous day.

'I didn't hear anything about that,' she said. 'Who was the poor girl?'

'Her name was Miriam Fox.' Carla's expression didn't hint at recognition, so I continued. 'She was an eighteen-year-old prostitute, a runaway.'

She shook her head and sighed. 'What a waste. Not a shock, because the potential for this sort of thing to happen's there all the time. But a terrible waste, all the same.'

Malik leaned forward in his seat and I immediately got the feeling that he didn't much like Carla Graham. 'I assume you didn't know her?'

'I don't know the name, no.'

I took the photo of Miriam posing for the camera out of my suit pocket and passed it over to her. 'This is her. We think it's a recent picture.'

She studied it for a long moment before handing it back to me. As I took it back I noticed she had graceful hands with well-kept, unvarnished nails.

'She looks vaguely familiar. I may have seen her before with one of the clients, but I couldn't say for sure.'

'We've been talking to some of the other girls who work the same area as Miriam did and they say she was particularly friendly with a girl called Molly Hagger. They said that Molly lived here at Coleman House.'

'Lived is the right word. Molly was a client of ours for some months but she walked out about three weeks ago now and we haven't seen her since.'

'You don't seem too worried about that, Ms Graham,' Malik said, only just about concealing his dismay that she should take the loss of one of her 'clients' so lightly.

'Mr Malik,' she said, turning towards him, 'Coleman House is home to twenty-one children aged between twelve and sixteen, all of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and all of whom have behavioural problems of varying degrees of seriousness. They are placed here by the council and we try to do our best for them, but the law is not on our side. If they want to go out at night, they go out. If I or any of my staff lay a hand on them to try to stop them leaving, they can have assault charges laid against us just like that, and believe me they'd do it. Put bluntly, these kids do what they like because they know they can do what they like. Half of them can't write their names, but they all know their rights inside out. And often, I'm afraid, they simply decide they've had enough of us and walk out the door. Sometimes they come back; sometimes they don't.'

'Don't you try to look for them?' Malik persisted.

She looked at him in the way a teacher looks at a particularly foolish pupil. 'We're extremely understaffed. It's hard enough keeping control of the ones who want to be here without worrying about the ones who don't. And where would we look for her? She could be anywhere.'

'Did you report her missing?' I asked.

'I informed Camden Social Services and they will have informed the police, but I didn't report it myself. I didn't see much point.'

'How old is Molly Hagger?'

'Thirteen.'

I shook my head. 'It's a young age to be out on the streets.' It was. Far too young.

She turned to me now. 'Mr…?'

'Milne.'

'Mr Milne, I can understand if you think I'm not taking Molly's leaving seriously enough, I can understand both of your concerns, but try to look at it from my point of view. I've been a careworker for a long time now, and I've tried to help a lot of kids make a better life for themselves. But the older I get, the harder it becomes. You see, a lot of the time these kids don't want to be helped. They get plenty of offers, I can promise you, but most of them just want to live fast, take drugs, drink. They're independent, but independent in all the wrong ways. They can't stand any form of authority but often they aren't capable of looking after themselves. They're not all like that of course, some do actually want to listen and learn, and they're the ones I find myself gravitating towards. But if I've tried to help someone, and they keep turning their noses up at that help, then eventually I have to stop.'

'And was Molly Hagger like that? Was she one of the ones who turned her nose up?'

'Molly came from a very difficult background. She was sexually abused from the age of four by both her mother and her mother's boyfriend. She was taken into care at the age of eight and she's been in it ever since.'

I thought of the girl in the photograph and felt mildly sick. 'Jesus…'

'It's far more common than most people think. You should know that, Mr Milne.'

'It doesn't make it any easier.'

'No, you're right, it doesn't. But, to answer your question, Molly wasn't one of our more difficult girls. She didn't resent her carers in the way some clients do, but she had a very different outlook on life that was a direct result of the experiences she'd suffered.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, she had a very casual and very adult view of sex. She had male and female sexual partners from a very young age, and from the age of ten she was charging for her services to certain individuals.'

'Has she run away before?'

'She's walked out on a number of occasions and not been seen for some time. The last time of any significance was about a year ago when she took up with an older man. She ended up living with him for several months before he got tired of her and threw her out. That's when she came back here.'

'So you think that might have happened this time?'

'I would think, knowing Molly, that that's a very likely scenario.'

I nodded, more optimistic now that she was still alive. 'We're going to need to speak to all your other, er, clients, and the rest of the staff to see if anyone else knew Miriam Fox and might be able to give us any relevant information.'

'The majority of the clients aren't here at the moment. Most of them attend local schools, or are supposed to anyway. Those who are in the building now are the ones who have special learning needs, and require one-to-one tuition. They might not be too helpful.'

They weren't. There were seven of them altogether and we interviewed them one at a time in Carla Graham's office, with her present. Two refused to answer any questions at all with anything more than yes or no, and of the rest only one claimed to have heard of Miriam Fox, and that was Anne Taylor, the youthful legal expert I'd met earlier. She said that she'd known Molly 'a bit' and that Molly and Miriam had been friends, even though Miriam was older. Anne had seen Molly with Miriam a couple of times while out in the evenings (she denied knowing that either of them had been prostitutes), but claimed she'd never really spoken to Miriam beyond the usual pleasantries. 'She seemed a bit stuck up,' she told us. 'She thought she was better than anyone else.'

And that was it. Carla made some effort to get her charges to speak, but it was a losing battle. They weren't going to tell the police anything, not if they could help it.

After that we interviewed the other members of staff present, four of them altogether. Two of them recognized the photo of Miriam and identified her as a friend of Molly's, but once again, neither had had any meaningful contact with her so couldn't, or wouldn't, add any further information.

'I don't know how much help that was,' said Carla when we were finished.

'It's difficult to tell,' I said. 'That's the thing with murder inquiries. It can often be a long, slow process and it always involves talking to a lot of people. Most of the time you don't hear anything significant, but just occasionally you do, even if you don't notice it at the time.'

'Well, I hope you're successful. It's worrying thinking that there's some maniac out there who could easily kill again.'

'We'll catch the perpetrator. I'm sure of that.' I stood up, and Malik followed suit. 'Anyway, thanks for your assistance this morning. It's appreciated.'

'I'll show you out,' she said, getting to her feet and leading us out of the office.

At the double doors, I shook hands with her while Malik nodded briefly and walked out. 'We'll need to come back and speak to the other clients at some point,' I told her.

'Of course. It would help if you could phone ahead, though. I'd like to be here when you come.'

She had nice eyes. They were a deep brown colour, with laughter lines round their edges. I would make sure she was there when I came back. 'I'll do that. It'll probably be sooner rather than later. It's important to close every avenue of inquiry.'

There was a sound of hysterical yelling and shouting from one of the rooms down the hall. It sounded like one of the female clients was experiencing a lack of customer satisfaction. In reply, we could just about make out the calm, measured tones of one of the social workers. It was greeted with another blast of abuse. Talk about a hiding to nothing.

Carla Graham sighed resignedly. 'I'd better go and see what all that's about.'

'You certainly have a difficult job to do here,' I told her.

'We've all got difficult jobs to do,' she answered, a rueful smile playing about her lips, and turned to

go. 'I think you had a bit of a thing for her,' Malik

said when I joined him outside.

I grinned. 'She's an attractive woman.'

'A little bit old.'

'For you maybe. Not for me.'

'A social worker, though, Sarge? It would hardly be a match made in heaven, not with your views.'

'Yeah. Somehow I don't think it's a goer.' But in an odd way I wished it could be. I needed some romance in my life.

It was getting on for one o'clock, so we grabbed some lunch at a nearby McDonald's. Malik plumped for Chicken McNuggets while I took the traditional route of Big Mac, fries, and a hot apple pie for pudding, washed down with a regular Coke. Not exactly the ideal start to my new diet.

'I didn't like her,' Malik said as he slowly chewed on a McNugget.

'I know you didn't.'

He swallowed. 'She was too cynical, you know? Like nothing would faze her.'

'It's no different to the way it is in our game. You build up a shell so that things don't affect you. You have to. I mean, let's face it, how would you like to work with those little fuckers?'

'No discipline. That's the problem.' He picked up another McNugget with his fork. 'Do you think any of them knew anything?'

'Anything of interest? I doubt it. I think we'd have known if any of them were lying through their teeth. They're not that good actors.'

'So it was a bit of a waste of time going down there, really.'

I smiled. 'Well, in some ways maybe.'

He ignored my comment, and changed the subject. 'I was surprised this morning by the preliminary findings.'

'That there was no sign of sexual assault?' He nodded. 'So was I. It sort of begs the question, what was she killed for?'

Malik hunted down and pinned his last McNugget. 'That's why we need to talk to the pimp.' But talking to the pimp had not proved any easier for our colleagues than it had for us the previous day. When we got back to the station we heard that he hadn't been at home when DS Capper and three others had called there several hours earlier. Apparently, he had a girlfriend who lived in Highbury, and he was supposed to spend quite a lot of his time with her, but he hadn't been at her place either. Nor was she in residence. Both properties were now under surveillance and all patrols had been advised to bring him in for questioning should they come across him. So far no-one had.

When I left that afternoon at 4.20, citing a nonexistent doctor's appointment as the reason for my departure (Malik made me feel guilty by looking concerned and asking if it was anything serious), the inquiry was heading towards thirty-six hours old with few substantial leads and a suspect against whom there was pretty much no evidence and who, so far, hadn't even got a viable motive.

There was, of course, still a lot of the race left to be run, as a sports commentator might say, but whichever way you looked at it the start hadn't been particularly inspiring.