Nevertheless, he had seen first-hand how Kaur had been affected by the sex ring case last year. Following on from larger, more high-profile cases in Rotherham and Sheffield, eight men in Coventry had been arrested for sexually abusing and exploiting young girls. The girls had been seduced with presents and sweet talk, then beer, drugs and the social status of having an older ‘boyfriend’ before being intimidated and eventually forced into sex acts with the entire gang of perpetrators and their friends. The oldest victim had been sixteen. The youngest, twelve.
As with similar crimes in other cities, a special Sex Crimes Unit had been set up, mainly consisting of outside officers. Matt had been effectively sidelined, a decision he hadn’t raised much of a complaint against. Sex crimes against minors were on no officer’s list of desirable cases and, on a personal level, he had to admit to himself he had had little to offer at that time. Kaur, however, had then been their most empathetic and hard-working Family Liaison Officer and had been absorbed into the unit to be heavily involved in the aftercare of the girls and their families as the harrowing details had come painfully and grudgingly to light. It had been over a year ago, and all eight men had been prosecuted, yet Kaur remained tight-lipped, and she had acquired that haunted look all officers involved in the more heartbreaking cases got, sooner or later. Matt had acquired his a long time ago, only to have it replaced by the impervious mask one learned, with time, to wear.
They remained silent as they reached Waterloo St and got out of the car, Kaur protected by an oversize navy umbrella. The rain had slowed somewhat, but still rolled in fat, cold drops down the back of Matt’s neck, pooling in the gap between his collar and his skin. A uniformed officer waved them over. The response team and the Divisional Surgeon were there, along with a small, achingly thin guy who visibly flinched as Matt approached. He looked to be one of the area’s proverbial crackheads, and not happy at the presence of so many police officers. Across the road a small crowd had gathered, and an expectant hush fell over them as they saw Matt. The guy in charge had arrived.
Matt hadn’t felt in charge of anything, least of all himself, for quite some time. Feeling the beginnings of a headache starting to pulse at his temples, he frowned at the uniformed constable.
‘She was found out on the street, like this?’
The constable nodded towards a large bin a few feet away.
‘Looks like she was dumped behind that, but a dog found her and dragged her out. It was worrying at the body when Jacob came and it ran off.’
Matt grimaced, not entirely at the gruesomeness of the image the young man presented but by the fact that meant even less chance of getting any usable trace evidence from the body. Next to him he sensed rather than saw WPC Kaur shudder, and looked in the direction of her gaze. The body was being zipped up ready to be taken to the station’s morgue, and the bag was just closing over her face. In spite of the large head wound and the obvious effects of being left out to the cruel mercy of the elements, Matt saw a young, blonde girl, young enough to be his daughter. He spoke in a low voice to Kaur.
‘It’s her?’
Kaur nodded, just once, such a tiny motion that he only saw it because he was expecting it. It was her; the only victim Kaur hadn’t been able to help. Matt felt a sinking feeling low down in his guts, that physical intuition that had only ever meant one thing; this was going to be bad.
*****
Rachael blinked, then sat up in panic as the phone rang loudly next to her ear. Her cat, Tabs, yowled in protest as she was pushed away from the comfort of Rachael’s lap. She scrambled for the mobile, sighing as the familiar number flashed up on her screen. She had always been a passionate believer that her job didn’t end when she shut the office doors and went home; that she had a vocation, not a career.
But two o’clock in the morning was taking the piss.
Rachael answered her phone in as polite a voice as she could muster.
‘Deirdra, how are you?’
Muffled sobs came down the phone. Rachael waited patiently. Deirdra as she preferred to be called, had been a service user for as long as Rachael had run the Sex Workers’ Safety Project, and for all her regular histrionics Rachael found herself more and more often viewing the younger woman as a friend. It wasn’t strictly ethical, but it wasn’t as though Rachael had a whole heap of friends. People tended to be either fascinated or repulsed by what she did for a living, by her daily contact with those they classed as ‘low-life’. The other women she worked with seemed to find Rachael unapproachable, a facade she had deliberately cultivated herself when she had been new to the post and now regretted. When your closest friends were people you were trying to help because their lives were, to put it nicely, complete train wrecks, you knew you were in trouble.
Friend or no friend, however, Deirdra’s late-night calls were beginning to get on her nerves. The sobs were turning shallower now, a sign the other woman was about to speak, and Rachael was surprised to hear herself making soothing noises she hadn’t been aware she was emitting. It was a toss-up between three possibilities, she thought with undiluted cynicism. Either Deirdra had been robbed by one of the other girls and wanted money, or had been robbed by a punter and wanted money, or had once again decided she needed to turn her life around and wanted money to help her do so. She settled back against her pillows as Deirdra started to speak.
Then sat bolt upright again.
‘Say that again,’ she said, urgently, not wanting to believe what she had just heard, wanting Deirdra to be wrong, for it to be a bad dream.
‘She’s been murdered.’ Deirdra paused and let out a ragged breath. Her voice sounded broken, and slightly slurred, after having been sober for three months. But now wasn’t the time to question her on her drinking. In fact, the urge to get completely obliterated looked at once very tempting to Rachael herself. Deirdra repeated the statement again, with a kind of wonder in her voice as though she had only just realised the truth of her own words. ‘Kitty’s been murdered.’
Kitty. It sounded like exactly the sort of moniker you would expect a prostitute to adopt, but had in fact been the girl’s real name. ‘Just Kitty,’ she had told Rachael defensively, ‘not Katherine or Katrina or Katy. It’s Kitty.’ She had seemed determined to hang onto her real name, and why not? She had lost everything else – not that her fourteen years of life had yielded her much to begin with. Of course, she had put her age down as sixteen on the service user forms, but a little digging from Rachael had unearthed both her name and her background. For the past week Rachael had battled with herself. By law, she had to report any danger to a minor to Children’s Social Services. She had stalled, knowing that to do so would not only break Kitty’s tentative trust in her but also possibly push the girl further along the path she had ‘chosen’. Social Services were often viewed as the Bogeyman to girls like Kitty, and any whiff of their involvement would have caused the girl to bolt.
Now, Rachael wondered if the girl would have still been alive if she had filed the report. The guilt, freshly born, hung over her head, ready to descend with the full force of its crushing weight.
She sat up and swung her legs over the bed, listening to Deirdra’s story as though in a trance, the information coming to her slowly, as if through a fog.
‘… found her under a bin, as if she was rubbish. She was just a kid!’ Deirdra wailed. The full impact hit Rachael then, like a physical blow, and she slid off the bed, her legs boneless. She reached for the bedside lamp and adjusted the dimmer switch, turning it up to full brightness. It had been on, of course; she never slept in the dark. There were too many ghosts.
‘How was she killed?’ Rachael’s voice sounded thick, her tongue feeling too large for her mouth. Vague images from old newspaper stories and documentaries ran through her head. Serial killers, torture, sadistic bastards preying on the