Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I was on my way to Leeds the following morning when my phone rang, a number with a foreign code flashing on the screen.
I didn’t recognise it, which was nothing new. My work’s number had belonged to someone else once, and I often got calls for that person – they’d since transferred to a different area.
“Mia.”
I recognised the voice. Atlas.
“How did you get my number?” I didn’t know why I was asking; Atlas could clearly find out whatever he wanted.
“Anything’s easy to find if you know where to look. Are you going to Leeds?” He sounded like he was in a good mood, and definitely walking. The line was clear enough to hear birdsong in the background.
“On my way there now.” Although the way there was coming to a halt, the traffic in front slowing down, emergency lights coming on. Probably a crash.
“Good. The investigation’s fixing on incels, isn’t it? You don’t need to confirm it; it doesn’t matter because I’m not seeking information from you.”
“Why are you trying to help? It’d make more sense if you told me what interest you have in it.” Given that the number he was calling from was technically abroad, and I was pretty certain that he was in England, there was likely to be zero chance I could call him back.
“If I could help, I thought I should, and what I should actually be doing’s pretty slow right now. This case intrigues me.” More birdsong. Water, maybe. “Is anyone keeping an open mind that this might not be a man? Your killer could be a female?”
“There’s nothing pointing that way, and I imagine you know the statistics about male on female violence – the media have covered it pretty well.
” It was still on the front pages, some stories that were going through the victimology, digging up comments left on Morgan and Brooke’s posts; some stories were more sensationalist, tales from women who thought they’d been targeted by the Push-Her.
“I knew them anyway,” he said. His background noise quietened.
“Don’t let the media pull you down a route that might not lead you to the ending you need, Mia.
You know women can be strong – you put your colleague on his back, didn’t you?
You’re looking at a collective of men who share the same hatred, but women can be just as bad.
What were groups of teenage girls like when you were a kid? ”
I stayed silent, the car having come to a stop. All lanes closed.
“There would’ve always been those girls who were bitches, manipulative. Girls can be angry too.”
“Why are you suggesting this? What do you know that’s making you think this way?”
There was silence on his end now, a voice in the background.
Then Atlas, muffled. “Just speaking to my girlfriend. Give me a minute.”
I wasn’t sure if I was meant to have heard that or not.
A door closed. “Sorry, Mia. I needed a cover story. Look, I have to go, but dig into Charlie. Look at the women and what else they may have in common. I’m fucking certain there’s something else there.”
The line went dead before I could respond.
I tried to dial the number, but just as I expected, the number was not in service.
Neither was the motorway, a pause on any movement, right where there was no radio signal, just white noise, so all I had to keep me company were my thoughts.
Adult social care, which was involved with Charlie Mason up until his murder, was based in a nineteen sixties concrete monstrosity that had as much available parking as a postage stamp.
The journey, it was safe to say, hadn’t been a highlight of my week so far, and while I wasn’t expecting it to get much better, I was well aware it could get worse.
Rain started again as I left my car, parked ten minutes away on a residential street that I didn’t think was residents’ permit parking only, but I’d find out later if I had a ticket on my windscreen.
A receptionist smiled at me when I walked through the doors, making me feel old because she looked about sixteen and probably was.
“Morning,” I headed over to her. “I’m Detective Sergeant Mia McAllister. I’m here to see John Leckey.”
She nodded, clicking her mouse. “He told me he was expecting you. Let me call up to the floor and I’ll get him to come down. Take a seat – the coffee machine’s actually working if you want one.”
I did, because I was forty-five minutes late, thanks to the closed motorway and some boy racer who’d decided to do a complete three sixty, involving five other cars, a lorry and a helicopter with paramedics.
The coffee was hot and tasted more of Bovril than coffee, but again, I’d had worse, so I wasn’t going to complain. I checked my phone for emails while I was waiting for John, hoping that there would be something revolutionary to break open the case.
There wasn’t. Not that I’d expected it.
I was ten minutes into recapping everything I knew about Chelsea Bainbridge when a man in his late-fifties appeared, tall, with the build of a runner, and hearing aids, he approached me with a friendly smile.
“I see you found the coffee machine then?”
There was a common theme with public offices: coffee machines that didn’t work, produced a liquid that the trade descriptions act could take umbrage over, or only poured for certain people.
“And it worked.” I held up the paper cup. “Kind of. I’m Mia McAllister. Thank you for seeing me.”
He shrugged and smiled. “I’ve nothing better to do. I actually retired last week after thirty years, and I’m kind of missing the routine already – not the job. I don’t think I’d ever miss the job.”
“I think I can understand that.” I followed him out of the foyer through an anonymous corridor to a lift.
“You okay with lifts?”
I nodded, unsurprised by the question. I understood social services from both the perspective of a police officer and as someone who’d had a social worker from the age of four to twenty-one, although after eighteen, I’d only seen them once a year and it was a different person each time.
It was a thankless job, ruled by red tape and bureaucratic decisions rather than common sense, and several of the social workers I’d had allocated to me had spent more time off sick than in work.
“How long were you based here?” I made small talk as the lift trundled upwards.
“All thirty years. Same offices, same sort of clients, different colleagues mostly, and definitely different management. If I’d have been in children’s social care, it would’ve been different, I’d have ended up leaving, but adults I found to be less demanding, you know.”
The lift came to a stop and we got out on a floor that would’ve looked just like every other floor in the building.
“How long did you work with Charlie Mason?” I followed John into a side room that was already unopened.
A small table and two chairs were there, the walls pinned with informative posters about claiming benefits or how to report domestic violence.
There was a sink and a kettle, a jar stuffed with tea bags and some long-life milk next to the sink, along with a couple of mismatched mugs, one proclaiming Leeds United to be champions, which was probably old enough to be considered an antique.
“Brew?” John didn’t sit down, switching on the kettle which had obviously recently boiled, judging by the sounds.
“Thank you. Just a bit of milk.”
“Best way to have it. So, Charlie Mason. I was his social worker from when he was twenty to when he was twenty-three, and I picked him up again when he was readmitted into Lindridge. He was passed onto my colleague, Tina Mulholland before he was discharged – I was on secondment to the quality assurance team for six months. I got to know Charlie quite well and I like to think we had a good relationship. I went to his funeral, which was sad, because there weren’t many there.
” He put two mugs of tea down on the table and sat on the chair opposite me.
“What was Charlie like? I spoke to Dave Beardsley who’s still working at Lindridge and he spoke warmly of him.”
“Ah, Dave, is he still there?”
I nodded, getting the feeling that John had all the time in the world to kill, so would happily go off on a tangent. “He said Charlie was okay. Messed up, but okay.”
“I’d agree with that. He was arrested countless times but rarely charged, just a night in the cells, which I sometimes thought was what he was after, especially if he was living back at home with his dad.” John stirred his tea. I’d noticed he’d put at least three sugars in there.
“What was your take on his childhood?”
He took the teaspoon out of the mug and tapped it three times, putting it down on the table.
“Abuse. Lack of attention, poor diet. Mum had significant mental health problems and had been known to social care since she was a teenager herself. Dad was a boozer and handy, he done a couple of stretches for GBH. They were a toxic combination, and really shouldn’t have been allowed to keep their kids, but they knew how to play the system.
Kids brought in an income, and for Charlie’s dad, well, I suspect he got something else out of them.
” John shrugged, dismissing it, although it didn't look easy. “No one ever disclosed anything though, and there was never enough. The number of safeguarding referrals that were made by the kids’ schools and one or two brave neighbours were never enough to be threshold for a section forty-seven enquiry and when we went round, or the police went round, we couldn’t get anywhere, so when Charlie came on my caseload when he was twenty, I wasn’t surprised. ”
“Why was he referred?”