Shadows. Paul Finch

out of the pub plastered, and start throwing more drunken punches. If or when he did that, she wouldn’t be too far away, and so they’d go through the whole dispiriting, time-consuming procedure again. But at least it wasn’t her problem for the time being.

      The detectives’ office – or ‘DO’ as it was known locally – was its usual hive of midday activity, with many comings and goings, keyboards chattering, phones ringing.

      ‘Result, Luce!’ DS Banks shouted from across the room, briefly breaking off from a phone call. Lucy acknowledged with a thumbs-up, before stripping her mac off, draping it over the back of her chair and slumping down at her desk. Here, she found a note from Harry, explaining that he was now over on the Hatchwood, getting the ball rolling by re-interviewing the various burglary victims that DI Beardmore had linked together. She was welcome to join him whenever she was able to.

      Before she drove over there, Lucy grabbed herself a cheese sandwich and a cola from the machine outside the DO’s main doors, and opted to check through her emails.

      Almost immediately, a piece of apparent junk offering cut-price Viagra caught her eye, the main reason being that it had slipped past the spam filter. She swilled cola and crammed down her butty as she made a note of the final few characters on its subject line.

      TC – Borsd 1-15.

      Meaningless to anyone not in the know, of course – more internet gobbledegook – but to Lucy it was as familiar as a street sign. She checked her watch. It was almost quarter past one now. The service would be departing the town centre imminently, which meant it would be calling outside the police station in the next ten minutes or so.

      She got up and pulled her coat on. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to attend meetings like this on her own. According to GMP rules, Harry ought to be present as well, but he wouldn’t get back here from Hatchwood Green in time, even if he was able to set off straight away – which he likely wouldn’t be if he was mid-interview. But it wouldn’t be the end of the world. If anyone asked, she was feeling out a possible lead. If it looked promising, she and Harry could do this thing together, officially, later on today or maybe tomorrow.

      She rounded the front of the building to Tarwood Lane and joined a couple of mothers with prams waiting at the bus stop there. She probably made a slightly incongruous figure, still dressed for court in a smart blouse and slacks, heeled shoes and her poshest beige raincoat, but if this was the way she had to do it, there was no real argument. Besides, she only had to wait a short time before the one-fifteen from Crowley town centre to Borsdane Wood turned up. The two young mothers clambered aboard first, Lucy assisting them with their prams. After she’d paid for her own ticket, she climbed the tight stairway to the top deck, where a single fellow passenger rode in the front seat – this was his usual position, mainly because the upstairs security cameras on this bus route were also located at the front, and thus unable to see the persons sitting directly below them.

      There was no one else anywhere near, so Lucy slid into the seat immediately behind.

      You wouldn’t be able to tell it while he was seated, but Jerry McGlaglen was a tall man, about six-foot three and now aged somewhere in his early sixties. Almost invariably, he dressed in elegant fashion – flannel trousers and matching blazer and tie were his preferred combination, often with a carnation in the buttonhole – though this often jarred with his thin features, sunken cheeks and wispy grey beard and moustache, not to mention his mop of grey hair, which had something of the feather duster about it. When you spoke to him face-on, he had odd-coloured eyes, one blue and one green, and unhealthy, brownish teeth; his personal hygiene wasn’t quite what it had used to be, either. As such, while he might strike an imposing figure from a distance, up close it was strange and rather scuzzy.

      ‘Why are we persisting with this cloak-and-dagger stuff, Jerry?’ Lucy asked quietly, after the bus recommenced its journey. ‘Can’t we just meet in the pub like everyone else?’

      McGlaglen didn’t look around. ‘Because what I am giving you today, my dear, is the biggest tip-off you’re ever likely to receive.’

      Lucy nodded. She’d heard this kind of promise before, but to be fair to McGlaglen, he rarely offered anything that wasn’t at least interesting. She clutched the horizontal bar at the top of his seat as they swung around a tight bend.

      ‘A particularly unpleasant fellow,’ McGlaglen added, ‘a true reprobate and degenerate is in town.’

      He’d been given to using flowery language for as long as Lucy had known him; he even delivered it in a dramatic, Shakespearean tone, all traces of his local accent suppressed. It was something to do with his past, she understood, though she’d never questioned him on it. Police informers came in every shape and size; all that mattered was the reliability of their intel.

      ‘A true degenerate, eh?’ she said. ‘Go on. I’m all ears.’

      ‘The Creep. You know of this beast, I take it? He’s in the town now … as we speak.’

      At first Lucy thought she’d misheard. ‘Sorry … what?’

      He neither looked round nor raised his voice. The one thing Jerry McGlaglen defended more zealously that his air of faded flamboyance was his right to anonymity; when imparting information to his police handlers, he was never less than exceptionally wary. He would do nothing whatsoever to attract attention to himself from the ordinary public. To Lucy’s mind that somewhat contradicted his manner of dressing and speaking, but when she’d raised this with him once in the past, he’d replied that his attire served its purpose as a double bluff.

       ‘They look twice, that is undeniably true. But when all they see is a well-known eccentric, they rarely look again.’

      ‘The Creep?’ she said, puzzled. ‘You mean the lunatic who hangs around cashpoints in Birmingham late at night, robbing people at sword-point. You say he’s in town? You mean here … in Crowley?’

      ‘This is the story I’ve been told, my dear.’

      ‘Jerry … how is that possible?’

      ‘Why … I’d imagine he bought himself a ticket at New Street, climbed onto a train and headed north.’

      ‘Funny man. I’ll rephrase the question. Why is he here … I mean in the Northwest?’

      ‘How could I know? Perhaps he has relatives here. He was unlikely to linger in the Midlands after what happened during his last attack, don’t you think?’

      Lucy pondered the info with rapidly growing interest. Even though Birmingham was eighty miles south, she’d read all about the case on various bulletins. The offender was basically a mugger, but the West Midlands press had named him ‘the Creep’ because of his crazy fixed grin, which owed possibly to a mask or heavy make-up. A Joker lookalike, then; a comic-book madman. But there hadn’t been much to laugh about for his victims, who’d not just lost wads of cash but, even when they’d complied, had been slashed with what appeared to be an old-fashioned but well-honed cavalry sabre. Invariably it had inflicted gruesome wounds, and in the case of the most recent victim, had proved fatal.

      She leaned forward. ‘How’ve you heard about this, Jerry?’

      ‘Now, my dear … as you know, I never divulge such things. But as you also know, my sources are impeccable.’

      ‘What’s the Creep’s name? I mean his real name.’

      ‘This I cannot tell.’

      ‘Cannot, or will not?’

      ‘Cannot.’

      ‘So where will I find him?’

      ‘Alas, I have no answer for that either.’

      ‘Jerry …’ she leaned closer to his ear, ‘you seriously think you’re going to get paid for this? Passing on an unfounded rumour that this guy may be in Crowley … may be? And giving us nothing else whatsoever?’

      ‘I suspected you’d be