previous plate that had been slightly larger.
‘I think I’ll do a check on the number,’ he said to his partner. They looked at each other, and the first officer walked over to engage the motorist in conversation again. They had worked together before, and they knew how to communicate.
Ten minutes later, they had obtained the motorist’s documents and he was in the back of the police car waiting to accompany them to the station in Edendale, once some support had arrived to secure the Renault. The two officers were grinning with suppressed excitement. They had just arrested Greater Manchester’s wanted man, Darren Howsley.
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25
When Ben Cooper got back to West Street, the change in the atmosphere was immediately obvious. DCI Tailby strode by along the corridor and was almost smiling. DI Hitchens was handing out peppermints.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Cooper.
‘Him,’ said Diane Fry, pointing at a file. ‘That’s what’s happening. He’s the happening man, all right.’ Cooper read the first page. ‘Darren Howsley. Aged
thirty-two. That’s the bloke Manchester are looking for.’ ‘Two uniforms brought him in last night. He’d run his car into a wall on Hanger Hill. A bit of bad luck, you might say. Or then, you might not. Depending on your point of view. Just a patch of wet leaves in the wrong place, and he was a bit hasty on the brake for the conditions. It could have happened to anyone.’
Fry started laughing. Cooper smiled tolerantly. He knew there had to be more.
‘And the bobbies were efficient for once. Thank God they weren’t on their way for a tea break or going off shift, or they’d just have banged a sticker on his car and given him a lift to the bus station.’
‘Any evidence on him?’
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‘A mask and a carving knife in the glove compartment. Will that do? Don’t say it too loudly, Ben, but it looks like we’ve got him.’
‘He has family in this area, doesn’t he?’
‘He was staying with his aunt at Chelmorton. It seems the old dear was terrified of him. She knew what he was like, but she was scared of telling anybody about him. Howsley had been at her house for two or three days when he turned up with the Renault. She knew it was stolen. I don’t think he bothered to hide anything from her. Also, the carving knife is the one missing from her kitchen. It’s just what we needed - he made a mistake.’
The next call came through directly to the CID room, because the caller had asked specifically for Diane Fry.
‘I thought you might want to talk to me again, Diane.’ Fry stiffened, surprised by the strength of her own reaction to the voice. ‘Maggie? Is that you?’
‘Yes. I hear from the news that there’s been another attack.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Tell me about it, Diane.’
Fry noted the ‘it’. Maggie didn’t really want to know about the woman who had been attacked; she wasn’t interested in who she was. She wanted to know what had happened, to hear the physical details of the attack. She wanted to know if it was the same as what had happened to her. For reassurance? Or simply for the purpose of inflicting yet more pain on herself?
Fry could have gone through the litany, as she had
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done with Jenny Weston. She could have told Maggie all the details she knew about Karen Tavisker. But she kept her mouth shut, waiting to hear the voice at the other end of the line, listening for meaning in it that she knew was never communicated by phone, but only by the expression in the face and the subtleties of body language.
‘Tell me. I want to know,’ said Maggie petulantly into the silence.
‘It’s not something I can discuss with you,’ said Fry. ‘We’ve made an arrest.’
‘An arrest? Who is he? Tell me about him. Does he have a connection to Jenny Weston - the one with the mountain bike and an interest in history and astrology?’
Fry felt her heart lift for a moment. It was five days since she had told Maggie about Jenny Weston, but Maggie had remembered Jenny’s interest in history and perhaps the idea that she might have visited Hammond Hall. It meant Jenny had become real to her.
But Fry thought of Darren Howsley, with the mask and the knife in his stolen car, and the independent, credible witness they had to identify him. She thought of the sweat she had shed over Maggie Crew and the strain on her own emotions, and of how little she had achieved. She had not even known that Maggie had a daughter adopted until her sister had mentioned it. And Fry worried about the question that Catherine had asked her - ‘how old are you?’ What did she mean by that?
She thought of Maggie’s attitude, of how she had cancelled her appointment, stood her up and humiliated
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her in front of the secretary. There was no way she was going through all that again.
‘There’s no point, Maggie,’ she said. ‘Because I don’t need you. You’re no use to me any more.’
Darren Howsley was an innocuous-looking man. When processed through the detention suite, he measured in at five foot nine inches and ten stone eight pounds. His hair was recorded as ‘light brown’. He had a small moustache, hazel eyes and a discreet tattoo of a tiger on his left forearm.
He spoke quietly, sometimes hardly at all, his hands clasped apologetically together in his lap. But he had been questioned by Greater Manchester Police on suspicion of multiple stabbings, in which three middleaged women had died and a seven-year-old girl had lost an eye. Howsley was currently on bail for an assault on a taxi driver who’d had the temerity to demand his fare.
He was questioned intensively for several hours, allowing for the statutory rest and meals breaks prescribed by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. The details of his movements at the times of the attacks on the three local women were gone over again and again, until all involved became tired of hearing the same questions and the same answers, or the lack of them.
