‘Let’s see what he’s got to say about it …’
‘You’ll be putting yourself in extreme danger …’
She laughed loudly. ‘The time for playing it safe is over! We’ve been waiting three years to hear from you lot. There hasn’t been a damn peep, so now my family has trusted me to get some answers. With or without your help.’
Before he could reply, she cut back across the spoil land, heading towards the main road. She was still limping, but covered the ground quickly, ‘yomping’ army style. By the time he reached the main road, she was on its verge, thumbing for a lift.
‘You’re more trouble than you’re bloody worth!’ he shouted, pulling up.
‘Yeah?’ She shifted away from him. ‘Disappointingly, you’ve been no trouble at all.’
He jumped from the car. ‘Do I have to arrest you for taking that transit van without its owner’s consent?’
She looked surprised. ‘I hired it.’
‘And now you’ve dumped it.’
‘I’ll phone them and tell them where it is.’
‘I can still take you in.’
‘Go on then.’ She folded her arms and waited. ‘I won’t resist. Only you didn’t lock me up when I threatened to knife you … what’s changed this time?’
Heck couldn’t at first respond. In truth, there wasn’t an answer he could give her.
‘Get in the car,’ he finally said.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be reading me my rights?’
‘You’re not under arrest. Just get in the car.’
Warily, she did as he asked, sliding into the front passenger seat.
Heck sighed as he walked around to the driver’s door. He wasn’t quite sure why he was doing this. But there was more truth in what the girl had said than even she might realise. Besides, he wasn’t much of a tough guy when it came to human suffering. Too many cops turned a blind eye to it – either as a defensive mechanism to stop it upsetting them, or because they were heartless shithouses who genuinely didn’t care.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked, as he climbed in.
‘First, I want proof that you’re who you say you are.’
She felt under her sweat top and produced a driving licence. From the ID and photograph, she was indeed Lauren Wraxford.
‘You’ve got bottle, Lauren, I’ll give you that,’ he said, as he switched the engine on and pulled away from the kerb. ‘You’ve also got a grievance. I reckon the very least I can do is buy you a cup of coffee.’
Heck pulled off the A580 on the outskirts of Manchester, into a bustling lorry park, where he halted, climbed out and headed on foot to a scruffy café sandwiched between a mountain of old tyres and a dilapidated shed with a sign over its lintel reading ‘TOILET’. Lauren got out as well, and leaned against the bonnet of the car as she watched him.
In his jeans, sweater and leather jacket, her chaperon didn’t look much like a cop, though she supposed he was a little more presentable now than he had been the previous night, when he’d been drunk and dishevelled and acting like a smartarse in that crappy London pub. Mind you, she supposed she’d looked a bit of a sight herself, dolled up like a teenage hooker.
She glanced over her shoulder into his car. A mass of paperwork had spilled from a zip folder on the back seat. It would be so easy just to stick her head in there and have a quick scan through it – but he might catch her and she didn’t want that. For the moment, she needed to keep him on side. Last night, she’d even have let him take her back to his pad and screw her, if that was what he’d wanted. She’d believed that firmly at the time, and she still believed it now. That was how desperate she was to learn more about his investigation. Hell, it might even have been a pleasure. He wasn’t unfanciable, in a rumpled, hard-bitten sort of way, though in truth Lauren rarely had time for love. Even when things were going well – and it was a long time since she’d been able to say that – sex was a purely mechanical process for her, designed to satisfy an urgent physical need. She’d had several lovers before, even a couple of proper boyfriends, but if there’d been anything deep and meaningful there, it had slipped past her.
‘How’s the leg?’ Heck asked, returning with two lidded Styrofoam beakers.
Lauren realised that she’d been rubbing at it. ‘It’ll be okay. Banged my knee on the steering column when I crashed.’
He handed her a coffee. ‘Seriously … you’d better report that van stolen as soon as you can, or you’re going to get locked up.’
‘Won’t they check for prints, and see there are none there but mine?’
‘They won’t swab an old donkey-wagon like that for a minor offence like TWOC.’ He glanced at her. ‘I mean … so long as there’s nothing in it that shouldn’t be there.’
‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing.’
He leaned next to her on the car, sipping his own drink, watching the afternoon traffic shunt noisily past. ‘So your family sent you to find your sister?’
Lauren sighed. ‘Not really. My family is basically my mum, Angel.’
‘That’s her name?’
‘Yep.’ Fleetingly, Lauren almost sounded scornful. ‘Angel by name, angel by nature. She didn’t want me to come at all. She said we should leave it to you lot.’
‘Sounds like a sensible woman.’
‘Oh, she’s dead sensible, my mum.’ Lauren sipped at her coffee. ‘So sensible that even though she’s white, she married a black bloke back in the 1970s. Any idea what that meant back then – living in East Leeds?’
Heck pondered. ‘Can’t have been easy. But what does your dad think about this adventure you’ve embarked on?’
‘Nothing. He was killed in an accident working on the railway … six years after they got wed. Left my mum to bring up two mixed-race kids on her own, on one of the roughest estates you’ve ever seen. And with no help from either side of the family, who, surprise-surprise, didn’t want anything to do with her anymore.’
At one time Lauren would have been too embarrassed to elaborate on some of the things she’d experienced in her earliest youth: seeing her mother have to clean words written in excrement off their council flat door every morning. At the time the words had held no meaning for her, but the little girl had been able to read them and had stored them in her memory until she was older, and now there was no doubt in her mind about what phrases like ‘white niggers’ meant.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘One day we received a letter put together with clippings of newspaper type. It went something like: “Watch out, because next I’m getting a wog or a wog lover. Signed … the Yorkshire Ripper.” Mum took it to the police, but they told her to ignore it, saying it was nothing more than a joke. A joke … for a single mum and two young daughters living on their own in that wasteland. Some joke, eh?’
‘Pretty grim,’ Heck acknowledged. ‘No wonder you and Genene were close.’
‘Well … we weren’t as close as we perhaps could have been.’
‘Whatever, your Genene did very well to get to uni after a start in life like that.’
‘That was Mum’s doing.’ Again, Lauren almost sounded resentful. ‘She set us the best example she could. After Dad died,