Death Row - Mark Pearson [101]
‘Remember those boxes he had stashed when we were last here?’
Sally nodded.
‘Half of them were filled with booze. I think he’s been depleting the stock before handing over the keys.’
A short while later Blaylock veered into a small yard that had twenty lock-up garages. Ten on each side, facing each other across a cracked and pitted drive, overgrown with weeds, that looked like it had been laid in the early 1970s and left to rot ever since.
Blaylock walked up to the last garage on the right and reached into his pockets to pull out a key. He put it in the lock in the handle on the centre of the door, twisted it and lifted the door up and in. He gestured with his hand and stood back, his arms folded. ‘Knock yourselves out.’
Delaney walked in with Sally and looked around the garage. It was small, piled high with cardboard boxes and packing crates – a lot of them filled, as Delaney had rightly surmised, with bottles of spirits liberated from the pub. There was no sign of an eight-year-old boy. Delaney moved a few of the boxes aside but a couple of minutes later they had to concede there was no evidence of the boy’s presence.
Delaney walked out and looked at Blaylock. ‘Stocking up early for Christmas, are we?’
Blaylock’s already red face flushed an even deeper hue. ‘I can explain about that.’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Delaney brusquely. ‘Frankly, we’ve got more important fish to fry.’ He gestured for Blaylock to shut the door and watched as he pulled it down again.
‘Hang on a minute,’ Delaney said as the door was closing. ‘Open it up again.’
Blaylock shrugged, puzzled, and did as Delaney asked. The detective strode forward and went to a box near the front of the garage. It was the one that Blaylock had been loading up when he and Sally had been in the pub a few days earlier. He moved a couple of items aside and pulled out a photo. He looked at it for a moment. ‘Delaney, you absolute feckin’ idiot!’ he said softly.
‘What is it, sir?’ asked Sally.
Delaney handed her the photo and, puzzled, Sally looked at it for a moment.
‘Look at the man on the left, Sally. Picture him without the beard and the moustache and the full head of quiffed hair. Picture that and then look who is standing next to him.’
Sally peered a bit more closely at the photo. ‘Oh my God!’ she said in a low whisper as recognition dawned on her.
*
Jennifer Hickling came out of the HSBC bank on Camden High Street in a foul mood. She had planned to withdraw her savings that morning, get her sister from school at lunchtime, take the Tube to Liverpool Street and take a mainline train out of London for good. She had an older friend called Kelly who had just turned sixteen and had a one-year-old baby. Kelly lived with her boyfriend, a nineteen-year-old apprentice car mechanic called Lloyd who absolutely doted on her. They had a house on a council estate in a small town just outside Norwich. But it was an estate as different from the Waterhill where Jenny lived that it might as well have been in another country. In a lot of ways it was.
The only trouble was that because of her age Jenny had opened the account with some false ID, including a driving licence which she had left back at the flat. Due to the large amount of money she was withdrawing – five thousand pounds – the manager had asked to see the driving licence again. Jenny had arranged an appointment with the woman for two o’clock. It meant an hour or so’s delay but her train tickets were valid up to four o’clock and it was only a two-hour journey to Norwich, where her friend and her friend’s partner had agreed to meet them.
She ran up the road to catch her bus, showing her real ID to a sceptical bus driver who reckoned she was at least three years older than she claimed but didn’t have the energy to argue the matter.
Jenny walked down the length of the bus to sit on her own on the back seat by the window.
She looked out of the grimy window at the brilliant blue sky, the streaks of pale red trailing through it like ink in water. She pulled her coat tighter around her and snuggled into the corner. She