Good Bait (DCI Karen Shields #1)(11)
All that was a long time ago, over fourteen years.
Letitia moved away.
If he saw her on one of her visits home, it was a nod of the head, a wave, and nothing more. If he bumped into her mother on her own and sober enough to answer, he’d ask how she was.
Now this.
He made the calls as promised the next day, finding himself passed on from person to person, extension to extension, all to no avail. Nothing about a Letitia or Rose Carlin was known, no accident or serious injury reported, no incident in which she had been named. There was no body of a similar age and size waiting to be identified.
He left it alone. Had half a mind to get in touch with Maxine and see what she’d discovered on her trip to London, always supposing she’d gone, but never followed through.
Other matters intervened. A pub brawl that ended with someone being pushed through a sheet of plate glass. State-of-the-art climbing gear stolen from the car park close by the old Carn Galver mine. A break-in at the post office and general store in St Buryan. At a campsite on Trevedra Common a caravan was set alight, the couple sleeping inside lucky to escape with second-degree burns.
Life, such as it was, went on.
7
Karen still couldn’t quite figure Tim Costello out. He’d been in her team for some nine months, detective sergeant down from CID in Leeds, where he’d been part of the Major Crime Unit for three years. Promotion overdue. Before that he’d studied for a degree in Criminology and Forensic Science at the John Moores University in Liverpool, his home city. Not that you could tell that from his accent, with which he could have read the Radio 4 news without causing a flutter. Nicely brought up, Karen thought. His mother probably had him scurrying off to elocution lessons from the age of six or seven.
Costello’s mother was Chinese, his father Irish. He’d inherited his father’s height and build, all elbows and sharp angles, and his mother’s features. His father’s father had migrated to Liverpool to work on the docks, back when such work was plentiful and the scratchings in County Galway were poor; his mother’s mother had come as a mail-order bride on a ship from Hong Kong. How his parents had met was a story still to be told.
Where Karen was concerned, he was suitably deferential; in his dealings with the other members of the team, including Ramsden, he was inclined to be a little cocky. A little too sure of himself, Ramsden reckoned, a bit too much mouth. Karen wasn’t so certain. Give him his chance, she thought, to come to terms, settle down – that happened and he might just blossom, come into his own.
Already had where transport was concerned. Cycled in from home, early hours, on a bike with a carbon-fibre frame and Shimano Deraillieur gears that cost, as Ramsden liked to say, more than his first f*cking car. Home for Costello being a flat on the Hackney–Dalston borders he shared with a girlfriend none of them had yet seen.
Lycra padded cycling shorts, black tights and brightly coloured long-sleeved jerseys, headphones clamped to his ears listening to a menagerie of bands like Foals and The Geese, to say that he and Mike Ramsden were several lifestyles apart would be no exaggeration. Karen would like to have considered herself midway between, but she wasn’t sure of that either. Sometimes conversations with Costello beyond police work made her feel as if she were taking classes in how another world lives and failing.
Back in the dead days following New Year and their discovery of Petru Andronic’s identity, the temperatures low, the skies intent on giving new meanings to the word grey, there’d been a glimmer of a breakthrough in the Walthamstow shooting. The bullets taken from the dead youth’s body had been linked to a haul of illegally imported arms and ammunition seized during a raid by officers from the Central Task Force on a warehouse in Deptford. While those officers continued to probe into the identities of those who had both imported the arms and sold them on, Tim Costello was liaising with members of the Met’s Forensic Intelligence Team to trace a possible pattern from other shootings in which guns and ammo from the warehouse had been used.
As for the Wood Green stabbing, it was still a case of speculation and blame. The victim, a youth of fifteen, Derroll Palmer, had no known gang connections, but both of the young men previously arrested and then grudgingly released were members of the Bruce Castle Kings, one of the sets of the Tottenham Mandem gang, and were known to Operation Trident; both had records for minor crime, including assault, yet their alibis had been difficult to break down. One youth had admitted under questioning to being present at the scene, an admission almost immediately withdrawn, his solicitor asserting that the statement had been coerced in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.
Tell that to the kid laying dead, Karen thought, killed for speaking up when another youth had called his girlfriend, whom he was walking home, a skanky whore.
And of Wayne Simon, missing since the Holloway murders, there was still no clear sign. A possible sighting in Gateshead, nothing more. If the reports were right, farther and farther north. Soon, Karen thought, he’d run out of ground.
She was busy finagling her responses to the latest set of quarterly crime figures that had filtered down from on high, when Ramsden knocked on her door and breezed through.
Sod’s law, a SIM card been found in the last but one bag of gubbins from the Andronic crime scene to be methodically searched, sorted and labelled; missed on a first, preliminary sortie, it had been buried inside a sodden wedge of shredded newspaper, along with rotting sweet wrappers, flattened cigarette butts, a smear of dog shit and a toddler’s missing sock. The original location was noted as the undergrowth to the eastern edge of the pond.