Page 9 of Deadly Cry

Stacey knew that individual officers who had worked the cases didn’t choose which ones to shuffle. The decisions were made by the DCI or higher.

‘Why the surprise?’

‘I thought they only shuffled cases with a chance of changing the stats.’

Stacey felt that was a jaded view of the process. Of course the force wanted more solved cases on their books. It didn’t hurt when national statistics compared force against force like a score card, but she liked to think the priority was still about solving cases, finding bad people and protecting victims.

‘You don’t think the case is solvable?’

‘Oh, I think it’s solvable. I think we solved it. But it’ll never get to court.’

Stacey could feel her irritation growing. She hated defeatists. Her own earlier doubts dissolved. She was working this case regardless of what Michaels had to say.

‘So you’re convinced Sean Fellows raped Lesley Skipton?’ she asked.

‘Oh yeah. We’re sure he’s the person responsible for the attack on Lesley and thank God we got him for the rape of Gemma Hornley or the bastard would still be out there.’

‘I’m not getting it,’ Stacey said, trying to understand what he seemed to be unwilling to say.

‘Look, you know as well as I do that for a rape trial you need the victim. Doesn’t matter what else you’ve got cos, to a jury, unless you can show them a traumatised victim, any physical evidence is just sex.’

‘So?’

‘We couldn’t put Lesley on the stand.’

Stacey was shocked. She’d seen nothing in the files to say that Lesley had refused to testify.

‘She changed her mind?’

‘You’re not getting it, love. We couldn’t let her near the courtroom because of what she might say.’

‘Like what?’

He paused for a few seconds.

‘Go see her, Stacey,’ he said, using her actual name. ‘Talk through the assault with her and then you’ll get why we couldn’t put her on the stand.’

Seven

The first things Kim noticed once she arrived at the crime scene were the blue jacket and jeans: the only description given for the woman separated from her daughter earlier.

Once she’d escaped the INEPT meeting, she’d listened to the voicemail left by Keats on his second time of calling. The message had simply stated that he had a body and the location.

Fielder Road was a side street that branched off Brierley Hill High Street. It had once held a couple of butchers and greengrocer stores before the Asda Superstore had moved in. Six of the shops had been boarded up, and the end two had been demolished, and that’s where Keats had directed her to come.

It had taken her brain less than a second to calculate that the crime scene was under a hundred metres from the Shop N Save she’d been in earlier.

And right now, she was looking down at a fair-haired woman who bore a striking resemblance to the little girl whose mother had now been found.

A wave of sadness washed over her as she remembered the child clutching the teddy bear given to her by the shop staff, clinging to it in the absence of her mother who would never hold her tightly again. Just this morning, that little girl had been leading a normal life, out shopping with her mother like thousands of others. Kim was always amazed that such a normal day could turn into the worst day of your life. Where was the klaxon? Where was the warning that this day would, in the future, hold significance against all others?

‘Has she been moved?’ Kim asked the pathologist.

Keats shook his head as he motioned towards the plain black handbag lying by her side.

‘Opened the flap to find ID. Her name is Katrina Nock, and this is her address,’ he said, handing a small piece of paper to Bryant. ‘Twenty-five years old.’

Kim was guessing he’d got the information from the driving licence, which would now be packaged up with the handbag and all its contents and sent off to the lab.