No Going Back by Casey Kelleher (black male authors TXT) 📗

‘This looks cosy!’ Holder grinned as Lucy ignored the ‘told you so’ look on his face. ‘We just had a call come in from one of the midwives on shift early this morning at the hospital. Katie Farmer. She said that it might be nothing. But that she’d just realised that her uniform cardigan is missing. It had her hospital ID on it and her nurse’s fob watch attached to the front. She said that she was with a patient who had been having suspected labour pains. Only she got called away, and when she came back the woman was gone. She finished her shift shortly afterwards and only realised her cardigan was gone now. But get this, she’s convinced that the patient’s name was Lizzie?’

Lucy pursed her mouth. ‘Shit! Holder, do you have your laptop? I’m going to need you to examine that footage again while I go and have another little chat with Jay-Jay Andrews,’ Lucy said then with urgency.

‘Yeah, I can grab it. Sure,’ Holder said. ‘Why, what are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that we have been focusing on the wrong man. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that we’ve been focusing on the wrong sex entirely,’ Lucy said, the realisation that it had been staring them all in the face this entire time hitting her then.

‘All this time we’ve been focusing on Jay-Jay Andrews. What if the attacker was a woman all along?’

45

‘I thought you could do with something hot to drink.’ Sliding the hot cup of tea and the KitKat across the table to where Jay-Jay Andrews sat, Lucy eyed the tape recorder but made a point of not switching it on. ‘It’s just you and me here, Jay-Jay. I’m not recording our conversation. This is off the record. Just a friendly chat.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Jay-Jay scoffed doubtfully, unimpressed so far with the good-cop routine that DC Murphy was putting on for his benefit.

He knew how manipulative and fake these coppers could be when they were desperate to get a result. And they were desperate, that much was clear. Because this lot really didn’t have a clue what they were dealing with here. Desperate to pin Shelby Cooke’s attack on him and the abduction of her baby. And the murder over in Richmond Park. They wanted to lock him up and throw away the key. Well, Jay-Jay wasn’t playing any more. Why should he make it easy for them, when all they seemed to do was want to make his life harder?

‘I know that you were there the night that Shelby Cooke was attacked.’

‘No comment,’ Jay-Jay said defiantly.

‘I mean, you can’t dispute it. Shelby described her attacker so accurately to the Facial Imaging Officer that the E-fit is almost an exact likeness. How do you think Shelby could have done that, if the attacker wasn’t you?’

‘No comment.’

Lucy sat back in her chair, taking a long hard look at the man before her. She took in the sight of the bleeding, bandaged wound on his head from where Ashley Cooke had struck him with the metal bar.

Jay-Jay’s eyes were black, puffy circles. His skin was sallow, his sharp cheekbones jutting through his skin, giving him the look of someone who was suffering from malnutrition. And he probably was given the hovel that Lucy had found him hiding out in.

‘The last few days can’t have been easy for you. Hiding away while a manhunt was being pursued all around you and everyone was looking for you, Jay-Jay. This vicious, deranged man who butchers pregnant women…’ Lucy said, purposely trying to get a rise from the man.

Only Jay-Jay was astute, prepared for her tactics. He’d been the other side of the table here many times before.

‘Only I don’t think that’s who you are at all,’ Lucy said. ‘Here’s the thing: I don’t think you attacked Shelby Cooke and I don’t think you abducted Riley. And I certainly don’t believe you murdered Liza Fitzgerald over in Richmond Park.’

Jay-Jay raised his eyes then, eyeing Lucy as he tried to work out what tactics she was using now, and more importantly why. Reverse psychology? Is that what she was doing? Telling him all the things that he was desperate to hear, in a bid to get him to finally break his silence, just so that he would say something. Anything at all.

‘Let me tell you what I think happened that night,’ Lucy said, keeping eye contact with the man as she continued, trying to read his reaction to her words.

‘I think you were there, on the Griffin Estate, and I think you were there for Shelby. That you were working for the Boland brothers, and they’d sent you there to collect Ashley Cooke’s debt, or to give Shelby Cooke a warning. Give her a bit of a scare… Or both.’

Lucy could see that she had Jay-Jay’s full attention now. His eyes were boring into hers.

‘Shelby saw you. She remembers you.’ Lucy nodded down to the E-fit to confirm that fact. ‘Only I think someone else got to her first. Before you.’

Jay-Jay remained silent, not interrupting Lucy or correcting her, so she took it that she was either right, or at least close to the truth.

‘Only I know that the attacker fled the scene. Leaving the knife and the rucksack with surgical implements behind. Shelby Cooke said in her statement that someone shouted. Alerting the attacker that they’d been seen. Someone disturbed them. But no other witness has come forward to identify or eliminate themselves from our enquiries. Because I think that someone was you. I think you saw the attacker. That you caught them in the act, and you were the one who shouted and warned them off, so that they panicked and ran.’

Lucy pulled out the photos of Shelby’s injuries.

‘When Shelby Cooke described you to me, she told me that she looked behind her and you were about twenty feet away. That she briefly saw your face, before