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Kim was stunned as his pleasant, affable expression turned dark. There was a rage simmering here below the constructed calm exterior.
Bryant stepped forward. ‘Easy, buddy.’
‘She asked. She kept asking, so now I’ve told you. You lot are shit. I lost my dad. He was murdered, and you lot did fuck all about it. Murderers are walking the streets free as birds because the police can’t do their job. At least the Black Country Angels are proactive and trying to get the scum off the streets.’
‘What happened to your—?’
‘No. We’re not going there,’ he said, stepping around her. ‘You lot had your chance back then, and you blew it. I’m not going there now.’
Kim turned to watch him walk away as a small van marked with the livery of ‘Fox’s Veterinary Services’ pulled up at the edge of the kerb. Teresa Fox’s father, Rufus, lowered the window and nodded in their direction as Curtis headed to the passenger side.
The two of them drove away, and Kim realised there was a lot more going on here than she’d expected.
SIXTY-EIGHT
Stacey put down the phone with a smile. The boss had called her directly for the first time since she’d found out about Birch. Okay, maybe it was because she knew Penn was out talking to the paramedics, but it was a start. Equally gratifying had been the boss’s admission that she might be on to something about the killer aiming to prevent the victims’ crimes.
‘Nathan Yates was trying to volunteer at a local youth club,’ she said, speaking to Alison for the first time.
‘No way. Wonder how that was going to work out for him. Did he not think they would do vetting checks?’
‘Maybe he thought that his juvenile record wouldn’t show up.’
‘How’s it going with tracking down the others?’ Alison asked.
‘Dean Newton wasn’t too hard to find,’ Stacey said.
Knowing she’d have little luck tracking down the ringleader, Ian Perkins, she’d looked at Dean Newton and Leyton Parks first.
Dean Newton was well known to them and had a hefty record on the PNC. Having been sent to Welton aged fifteen for minor involvement in the armed robbery of a petrol station in Coseley, he’d done nothing to change his ways since. After being released, he’d wound up in adult prison for robbery-related crimes. From his record, there were no episodes of violence, mistreatment of women or sex-related offences, and his crimes hadn’t escalated in the years since his first offence. He simply couldn’t keep his hands off other people’s stuff. He was a career burglar, and his time inside was treated like an occupational hazard. A brief calculation told her that since his first spell inside, the days he’d spent incarcerated by far outnumbered the days spent free.
She’d searched social media, and his only real presence was on Facebook, where his favourite activity was posting photos of every pub he liked to frequent. She counted almost thirty separate photos of a pint.
There was no doubt that the man wasn’t hard to find. Trail the pubs around Hollytree for long enough and you were bound to trip over him.
His last photo had been posted just the night before in The Tenth Lock in Brierley Hill.
Dean Newton was definitely still alive and kicking. For now.
SIXTY-NINE
‘Colourful,’ Bryant noted as they knocked on the front door of Dean Newton’s address.
‘A bit like his record,’ Kim said above the shouting she could hear within. Apparently all the occupants wanted someone else to answer the door that had been battered in so many times she could see three different colours of paint.
Eventually, the door was pulled open by an emaciated male in his forties, dressed only in boxer shorts.
Kim fought the stench of the flat to produce her ID. ‘Dean Newton?’
He glowered and shook his head, calling behind. ‘Newt, pigs are ’ere.’
Oh, it had been a while since they’d been called that.
‘Yeah, mate, the nineties called. They want their insults back,’ Bryant offered.
‘Fuck you,’ the man said, walking away from the door.
The history books recorded a time when there had been a natural respect for police officers. Kim couldn’t quite imagine it now, as a lad no older than nineteen passed by the door wearing a pair of pyjama bottoms and holding a can of Stella.
