Nowhere to Run

A missing child. A dead body. A killer on the loose.

Returning to Exeter CID after his son’s unsolved disappearance Detective Sergeant Peter Gayle’s first day back was supposed to be gentle. Until a young girl is reported missing and the clock begins to tick.

Rosie Whitlock has been abducted from outside her school that morning. There are no clues, but Peter isn’t letting another child disappear.

When the body of another young victim appears, the hunt escalates. Someone is abducting young girls and now they have a murderer on their hands. Time is running out for Rosie, but when evidence case relating to his own son’s disappearance is discovered the stakes are even higher…

Nowhere to Run

Jack Slater

JACK SLATER

Raised in a farming family in Northamptonshire, England, the author had a varied career before settling in biomedical science. He has worked in farming, forestry, factories and shops as well as spending five years as a service engineer.

Widowed by cancer at 33, he recently remarried in the Channel Islands, where he worked for several months through the summer of 2012.

He has been writing since childhood, in both fiction and non-fiction. Nowhere to Run is his first crime novel and the first in the series of the DS Peter Gayle mysteries.

It is often said that, although writing is a solitary pursuit, it cannot be done in isolation and this book, more than any other I have written, has proved this for me. There are several people who I must thank for their help and advice. Kathy Gale put me on the right path. The front-desk staff at Heavitree Road police station, Exeter and Banbury police station in Oxfordshire were incredibly helpful. Rick and Christine Ell added some much-needed inside knowledge. Fellow author and former police officer David Hodges selflessly answered several technical questions. Rhea Kurien and Victoria Oundjian of Harper Collins saw the potential in my rough manuscript. And last but most definitely not least, my wife, Prunella, whose contributions are too many to list – she says!

For Pru – my wife, my best friend, my partner in crime (fiction) and so much more.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Author Bio

Acknowledgement

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Copyright

CHAPTER 1

Lauren strained with aching fingers to get purchase on the knot, but all she managed to do was force it tighter around her already sore wrists.

She was breathing hard, heart fluttering in her chest as she struggled to escape. She closed her eyes in concentration. She could feel every strand of the tough braided nylon. It was rubbing her skin raw, but she had to keep trying. Had to get loose. Had to get away before he came back.

In her ten troubled years she had dealt with all sorts of men, but none like this one. She had heard stories of perverts and child-molesters, had even met a couple, not that she’d known at the time, but this guy – he was more than that. He’d kill her. It was there in his eyes when he looked at her. He’d do what he wanted with her, then . . .

A sob escaped through the gag that was tied across her mouth as her fingers slipped off the rope yet again. She didn’t have the strength for this.

*

Pete Gayle stepped into the Exeter CID squad room and a hearty cheer went up. He paused in the doorway, grinning. Glancing around the big, open-plan office, he saw that the noise was being made by a pitifully sparse crew. The place was almost empty, just his own team there, but they were certainly making up in volume what they lacked in numbers.

A bunch of helium balloons shot up over his desk, bright and multicoloured, on strings that held them about halfway to the ceiling. Two of his three DCs stood up, stretching a ‘Welcome Back’ banner between them.

He stepped forward and took a bow to enthusiastic applause.

‘Welcome back, boss.’

‘Good to see you, Sarge.’ Grey-suited and grey-haired Dick Feeney threw him a salute with his free hand, the bright colours around him emphasising his colourless appearance.

‘About time, too.’ That was Dave Miles, at the other end of the banner from Dick.

Pete raised his arms. ‘Thank you, fans. Thank you very much.’ He headed towards them.

Clustered in the far front corner of the big office, his team consisted of Detective Constables Dave Miles, Dick Feeney and Jane Bennett and PCs Ben Myers and Jill Evans.

Dick and Dave pushed the banner onto a couple of pieces of Blu-tack on the wall behind them.

‘Nice to be back, boss?’ Dave gave him a lopsided grin. Long and lanky, he was dressed in dark trousers and an open-necked white shirt with a waistcoat over it, his dark hair neatly combed.

‘I wouldn’t know. I haven’t even got to my desk yet.’

‘It’s good to see you, Sarge,’ Jill said. Small, slender, dark and immaculate as always, Jill had been a caring but firm PC on the beat and had joined his team two and a half years ago, after impressing him on a case involving a homeless guy whose girlfriend had been raped and murdered. He had looked good for it, with no alibi and a history of drug abuse, but Jill had finally proved that he couldn’t have done it and supported him through the process of finding out who had.

He was now off the streets and the gear, and working in a betting shop. Or, he had been, last Pete had heard.

‘That’s right,’ added Ben, the spiky-haired and baby-faced newbie of the team, having moved into the office just over a year ago.

‘What did Louise think of the idea?’ asked Jane. Shockingly, her red hair, which she had always worn long, had been cut into a stylish bob, parted and swept back at the sides since he last saw her. It was a drastic change, but it suited her.

‘She hardly noticed, to be honest,’ he admitted. ‘She doesn’t take much interest in anything, lately.’

Jane’s face fell. ‘I’m sorry, boss.’

Pete shrugged as he reached his desk and sat down opposite her. ‘So, what’s the news? What’s been happening?’

They sat, the celebratory mood broken.

‘Well, today’s all about Operation Natterjack,’ Dave said. ‘Bloody stupid name. Everybody’s out, dragging drug dealers, distributors and manufacturers out of their beds and off the streets.’

‘Which is why Colin wanted me back in today, to keep you lot under control. Yeah, I know about that,’ Pete said. ‘What else?’

There was a pause. Then Jane shrugged. ‘Not a lot, really, boss. We’re just hoping for a nice, quiet day. Share a pizza for lunch. Keep the phones manned and wait for the glory boys to trickle back in with all their arrests, which they’re going to have to do the paperwork on while we sit back and take the piss.’

He looked from one face to another but no one had anything else to say. ‘OK then. A nice, quiet day it is. We hope.’

*

Lauren’s cheeks were wet with tears, her chin slick with dribbled saliva. She had pulled and pushed, twisted and wiggled the ends of the finger-thick rope around her wrists, but all she had gained were aching arms and fingers and raw, abraded wrists. She had been trying for what seemed like ages. She was exhausted, no longer caring about how disgusting the gag was in her mouth with the spit and the snot and the tears.

God, she wished she had someone who would come looking for her. Come and rescue her from this bloody middle-of-nowhere barn and the arsehole bastard who’d dumped her here. But there was no one. If she was going to get out of this, it was down to her.

She sucked in a breath and, biting down on the wet gag, set to work once more, pushing through the pain.

Curling her fingers up and around, she touched the knot at her wrists and hooked her short nails into the rough strands. She burrowed one slender finger into the knot then wiggled it around as much as she could. If she could just force the rope back through, then get a hold on it . . . She felt it slip just a tiny bit.

‘Yes,’ she gasped.

Tension and excitement mingled in her stomach. She felt queasy as she tried again. Yes, definitely. She adjusted her grip and tried once more, pulling it straight up and – yes! It finally released. She wriggled her wrists and shook her arms. The bindings fell away and her arms slumped to her sides as she fell forward, howling in agony as her shoulders, stuck for so long in one position, dropped free. It was several seconds before she dared to try to lift her arms to untie the gag.

Vision blurred with tears of pain and relief, she could see redness around her wrists, but not how bad they were, as she loosened the gag and spat it out, then reached for the rope at her ankles.

Pulling the knot around to the front, she was glad for the first time of the knee-length white socks they made her wear for school. Quickly, she untied the thin rope and got to her feet. She staggered and put her hand out to the dusty stone wall, waiting a moment until she felt steady. Now she just had to get through those doors and she would be free!

There was no catch or lock on the inside.

She leaned her full weight against the junction of the big, old wooden panels and heaved.

Nothing.

‘God! What now?’ Her voice sounded strange after being gagged for so long. She felt reluctant to make a lot of noise. Not that she had heard any sign of anyone since the man left, but . . . If she was heard by a friend of his, and caught, then . . .

She flinched as a hiss came from the rafters, above and to her right, all the way at the end of the barn. She looked up into the darkness under the roof tiles. Saw a pair of eyes staring down at her. Then another pair.

‘What are you looking at?’ she muttered to the two young owls.

Their parents had it easy. They came in and out of the barn through a hole in the corner of the roof. She had watched them numerous times. She, on the other hand, had to get through these bloody doors.

CHAPTER 2

Pete heard the door open behind him. He finished pouring his coffee, put the jug back on the coffee maker and turned to see who had come into the small kitchen.

‘Jane.’

‘Hey, boss.’

‘So, come on. What weren’t you telling me earlier? What’s been going on while I’ve been gone?’ He took a sip of his coffee and moved aside so she could get some for herself.

‘Well . . . there hasn’t been much, really. Just the usual odds and sods. Burglaries . . . We cracked that string that we were working on when . . . well, you know. A hundred and eighty-seven, it ended up at. All down to one bloke. Derek Atkins. He’s due in court in a couple of months.

‘There was an illegal licence plate deal going on, down on the Marsh Barton industrial estate. We closed that down a few weeks back. They were making them and selling them for cash, without documentation, to all and sundry. Mainly crooks wanting falsies for getaway cars. Major coup, that was. The blokes doing it kept records of who they sold to, stupid sods. We got loads of leads out of that, for all over the place. Here, Dorset, Avon and Somerset, West Mids, Thames Valley, even the Met. I don’t know how many cases got solved out of that one bust. Anyway, they’re the highlights, I suppose.

‘Currently, DS Phillips has got a job on out at the airport, in conjunction with the Transport Police and Customs and Excise. A smuggling ring. They’re hoping to make some arrests on Wednesday, I think. And DS Hancock has got something else going on, on the industrial estate. A series of break-ins. Tools and equipment nicked and safes and cash boxes raided. I don’t know all the details, but I don’t think they’ve got much yet. What about you? How are you doing?’

Pete pursed his lips. He’d known Jane since they were in uniform together, eight or nine years ago. She’d been the first recruit to his team when he’d got his sergeant’s stripes, closely followed by Dave, and he knew full well when she was prevaricating. ‘Never mind me. What’s been happening about Tommy?’

Jane sighed. ‘Boss, you know how it works. You’ve got to stay out of that. If you don’t, anything we find can be compromised.’

‘I don’t need lectures, Jane. I need facts. I’m his dad. I need to know what’s happening and Simon’s told me sweet FA over the last month or more.’

Jane grimaced. ‘As far as I know, there’s been nothing to tell. He hasn’t got anywhere.’

‘Well, why the hell not?’ Pete set his coffee down before he spilt it. ‘Surely, a missing kid – and a copper’s kid at that – takes priority over a smuggling ring that the Transport guys should be handling on their own, anyway?’

‘Of course. But they’ve got nothing new to work on. They’ve run down all the leads they had. It’s like he’s just disappeared off the face of the earth, from what I can gather. And I have been keeping up with things on the quiet.’

Pete sighed, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Sorry, Jane. I’m just—’

‘Frustrated to hell and back, I expect,’ she cut in. ‘We’ve been helping where we can, but it’s Simon’s case, so . . .’ She shrugged. ‘How’s Louise coping?’

Pete pursed his lips. ‘Not so good. If anything, she’s been getting worse, not better, the past few weeks. And I can’t seem to help. If I try, all she does is snap my head off, so . . . I just leave her to it as much as I can. I don’t like to, but . . .’ He shrugged.

‘Must be tough on you, too, though, eh?’

‘Yeah, well. It’s supposed to be, isn’t it? It was me that wasn’t there to pick him up.’

‘Oh, come on. It wasn’t your fault.’

He felt a swell of bitter guilt. ‘If I’d been there when I was supposed to be, it wouldn’t have happened, would it?’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t like you forgot or didn’t bother, was it? You were busy. Saving my arse, as it happened.’

Pete smiled, knowing what Dave Miles would have said to that, as persistently politically incorrect as he was. It was true; he had been working – caught up in an arrest with Jane and a couple of PCs. An arrest that had gone horribly wrong until he managed, somehow, to rescue the situation.

They had been going to bring in a shopkeeper who had been using the cover of furniture imports to bring in cannabis from Thailand. A job that had, ultimately, been a contributing factor leading towards today’s Operation Natterjack. But when they got there, the guy had not been where they expected him to be. Instead, he had been in the back room, unpacking a delivery. When Jane went in through the back door, a PC in tow, while Pete went in the front with the other uniform, the bloke had seen her badge and panicked. The Stanley knife in his hand had become a weapon. He’d grabbed her, threatening to cut her throat. It had taken Pete twenty minutes to talk him down.

Twenty minutes that made him late getting away at the end of his shift.

‘What, so now it’s your fault, is it?’ he asked with a smile.

Jane’s green eyes flashed. ‘No. If anyone’s to blame its Ranjit bloody Seekun, the bastard who held a knife to my throat. Or whoever actually took Tommy.’

‘Mmm.’ Pete picked up his coffee and took a sip. ‘Ugh. This is bloody cold already.’

*

The doors at the back of the barn had straw bales stacked along in front of them, a double row then a single, like a line of seats in one of those old Roman places. Lauren imagined a row of men sitting there, watching her as she lay in the straw, and a shiver ran through her. Suddenly, it seemed to get darker and the temperature dropped. Then the noise started. An intense rattling on the roof above her. She wondered what the hell it was, then she heard a rustling from outside as well. Hail, she realised. But hail or not, she had to get out of here. She jumped up onto the bales, heaving at the doors behind, throwing all her weight into it.

The doors barely moved, but, as she pushed, she saw light down behind the bales.

A gap.

She jumped down, heaved on the bale in front of her and shrieked as she fell back, the bale coming away far more easily than she had expected. She got up, pulled another one away, then another. Behind them, the ancient wood had rotted away and a sheet of corrugated iron had been fixed over it, on the outside.

And metal could bend.

‘Yes!’ Lauren was breathing hard, but the excitement of possible escape kept her going. The rattle of hailstones on the roof continued as she sat down, put her feet against the metal and pushed.

*

By five o’clock, the squad room was back to full capacity and as noisy as Pete remembered it with the incoming officers chatting and joking about the arrests they had made that morning. They had begun to drift in from mid-afternoon. Teams brought in the men and women they had arrested during the morning raids, processed them into custody and interviewed them, then came upstairs to type up their notes and reports. Even with an extra man on the custody desk it was a slow process. Officers were frustrated and short-tempered by the time they got to the squad room, but when they came in and saw Pete at his desk, they each came over and welcomed him back, asked how he was doing, expressed their sympathy or asked after his wife and daughter.

Leaning back in his chair, his day almost over, Pete heard a phone ring among the hubbub and looked up to see whose it was. DS Mark Bridgman picked up his phone and held a hand up to the two men who were chatting next to his desk. Pete watched as he spoke briefly into the phone, then put it down and stood up, heading for the door to the DI’s office at the far end of the squad room.

He knocked and went in. Emerged a minute later and returned to his desk.

‘So, what do you reckon, boss?’ Dave Miles asked.

Pete spun his chair back around.

Dave was looking at him with a half-smile. ‘Looks like gardening season’s over, so are you back for good, or what? Do you reckon you’ll be able to stand the pace?’

‘Well, if today’s anything to go by, I reckon I’ll cope.’ We’ll see how Louise dealt with it when I get home, he thought.

The door at the far end of the room opened and both DI Colin Underhill and DCI Adam Silverstone entered the room.

Hello. Something’s up.

He hoped they were not going to make a meal out of welcoming him back. He’d had plenty of that through the afternoon. He didn’t need the official version, especially from Silverstone. He sat up straighter in his chair as Underhill raised his hands for quiet.

Silverstone stepped up beside the older man. In his immaculate uniform, he looked exactly what he was – a career desk-jockey who’d barely know one end of a baton from the other and had certainly never felt the greasy collar of a drug-pusher or a burglar. The contrast between the two men was almost laughable. Colin was the bigger man in every sense apart from rank. An inch taller, a good four stones heavier, fifteen years older and hugely more experienced, he was a man-manager, not a pen-pusher. He’d walked the beat, come up through the ranks and he looked every inch of it in his slightly rumpled tweed jacket and cord trousers.

‘Right,’ said Silverstone. ‘What’s everyone doing at the moment? I need to know what cases each DS has on their desk, as of now, excluding this morning’s haul. Mark?’

Bridgman looked up and set his pen down. ‘We’ve got the city centre muggings and the break-ins down on the Marsh Barton industrial estate, sir. We’re at a crucial stage with the muggings.’

The DCI nodded. ‘Simon?’

Phillips glanced at Pete. ‘Tommy and the Jane Doe, sir. And the airport job.’

‘Jim?’

‘We’re leading on the drugs, sir. All this morning’s stuff, plus trying to track down where it’s coming from.’

‘Right. OK. I think, Simon, you ought to have this new one. A missing girl. Thirteen years old. Rosie Whitlock. Dropped off at school this morning and never went in. Parents are Alistair and Jessica. Live in the St Leonard’s area of the city. Mark’s got the details.’

Pete spun around to face his team. ‘What are we? Invisible?’ He pushed himself up out of his chair as Dave shrugged.

‘Maybe he thinks it’s too soon for you, boss,’ Jane suggested.

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

*

Lauren peered with a sinking heart through the gap she’d created at the blackened forest of stinging nettle stems beyond. But, she only had two choices – stay or go. And if she stayed . . . She didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her. She grabbed a couple of big handfuls of loose straw, pushed it out through the gap in front of her, then started to wriggle through, arms in front of her face, hoping that the sleeves of her cardigan might offer some protection from the burning stings.

Metal scraped the back of her head and she ducked lower. She felt the dull edge dig into her shoulders. There was no going backward now, even if she wanted to. It was forward or nothing. As long as she didn’t get stuck . . .

‘Oh, God.’ A vision filled her mind of her stuck half in and half out of the barn, wedged under this bloody door when the man came back and found her. Caught hold of her legs and . . . Throat clogged with terror, she scrambled forward. The old stems crackled like fire as they snapped and broke, adding to the noise of the hail. Then, between her panting breaths, she thought she heard something else.

She stopped moving. Held her breath, straining to hear.

‘No, no, no.’

An engine.

He was coming.

She pulled herself forward. The corrugated iron pressed down on her backside. Her thighs. Then she was rolling out and free, curling into a ball to protect herself from the nettles, barely registering the miracle that she had yet to be stung. Her bare legs felt suddenly chilled. Goosebumps rose on her skin. She got up, pressing herself against the stone wall and looking around for the first time.

The hail was still coming down hard, thick enough that she could not see clearly through it. The nettles were bending and swaying beneath it – nettles that stretched away, dense black and brown, in front and to the right, all the way to a dense thorn hedge, beyond which lay open fields. To her left, there was a gap at the side of the barn, a barbed-wire fence and woodland, dark and inviting.

The van sounded terrifyingly close. She began to edge along the side of the old stone wall, reaching out with her left foot to press down the nettles, breaking the stems before moving over them. The engine stopped.

Oh, God. Her breathing got shallow and fast as terror gripped her.