Strangers: The unforgettable crime thriller from the #1 bestseller

Chapter 1

Now …

He said that his name was Ronnie Ford and that he was from Warrington. By the looks of his heavy build, weathered face and chalk-grey hair, he was somewhere in his late forties. Apparently, he ran his own business – an auto-repair shop, which explained his ragged sweater and oil-stained canvas trousers – but he added that he was now on his way home for tea. Weirdly, the longer the woman rode alongside him, the more she came to suspect that he’d picked her up for honest, even gentlemanly reasons.

For the first fifteen minutes of their shared journey, he’d kept his eyes firmly on the road, chatting amiably, covering every subject under the sun, from the unseasonably mild autumn weather, to the poor state of the Malaga hotel where he and his wife had spent two weeks last August, to the latest and, in his opinion, even-more-hopeless-than-usual contestants on the new series of X Factor. It was all very affable and light-hearted.

So … a bit of a father figure, Ronnie Ford.

Or at least, an avuncular uncle type.

But ultimately he was a man too. And seemingly as red-blooded as so many others.

When he parked the car in the quiet lay-by and she climbed out, he climbed out as well. When she ran giggling to the stile, he followed her, expressing open if feigned admiration as she climbed it with lithe efficiency, despite her tight, knee-length skirt and four-inch heels. It helped, of course, that she did it sexily, wiggling up the rickety ladder and stepping prettily over its topmost rung before descending into the field on the other side.

At this point, he shouted. ‘Hold up, love! Whoa … wait a minute!’

He’d lost sight of her, thanks mainly to the autumn twilight. It was early October and not yet seven in the evening, so it wasn’t what you’d actually call dusk. It wasn’t even what you’d call cold. They’d had an Indian summer, which even now was only dissipating slowly, but light was leaching from the cloudy sky and dim traces of mist rising in the undergrowth.

In the field, hacked stubble was all that remained of a recently harvested crop. It was roughly the size of a football pitch, but as the woman already knew, there was a clear pathway running straight as a ribbon to a belt of reddish-leafed trees on its far side. She hared off along this, still giggling. She had no idea why men found that ‘cheeky giggle’ thing fetching; she supposed it harked back to those daft naughty schoolgirl fantasies that generation after generation of saucy movies and top-shelf lads’ mags had impressed on British male society.

From behind, she heard the clump of Ronnie Ford’s feet on the wooden rungs, and his loud grunts for breath. A non-too-fit avuncular uncle then, but evidently a man who now felt he was on a mission.

They usually were in the end. It was always so pathetically easy.

She’d only needed to remove her black knitted beret and shake out her blonde locks, ease down the zip on her anorak just sufficiently to reveal the skimpy blouse underneath, and then cross and uncross her legs a few times while he’d attempted to drive.

The surreptitious sidelong glances had started soon after. And then, about quarter of an hour into the journey, when the suggestive conversation had commenced, she’d known he was hers.

‘It’s okay to check me out,’ she said in what was almost an apologetic tone. ‘I know I’m a bit of alright. Men are always saying crude stuff like that to me. I’ve got used to it now. So if it makes it easier for you, I don’t mind you looking.’

‘The problem is,’ he replied, heat visibly flaming the back of his neck, ‘I’ve got to concentrate on the road. Where did you say you were heading for again?’

‘Liverpool.’

‘I can drop you off at Warrington bus station. You’ll have no problem getting a connection to Liverpool from there. It’s not too far.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘Not at all.’

Despite having permission, Ronnie still only glanced furtively at her. Possibly he was even more of a gentleman than she’d first thought. Or maybe it was just his age and upbringing. She’d all but invited him to ogle her, but his initial reaction seemed to be to try and resist, to try to avoid getting drawn into those huge doe-eyes, which had gazed on him so beseechingly when he’d first pulled up alongside her, as if to say: ‘Are you here to help? Is it possible you are genuinely here to help? Or are you only after one thing too?’

That always added to the allure, the ‘little girl lost’ approach.

She resumed that teasing conversation, again crossing and uncrossing her legs so that the hem of her skirt started to rise.

‘Warrington’s still quite a ride from here,’ she said. ‘And I’ve nothing to pay you with.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘I’m going that direction anyway.’

‘Yes, but you should get something for your trouble. I’m Loretta, by the way.’

‘Erm … nice to meet you, Loretta.’

Somewhat belatedly, he fiddled with the radio, trying to find a different station, something smoother than the hard-edged rock jarring out at them. After twenty seconds jamming and prodding, he located a slow, bluesy saxophone and turned it down a notch so that it could clearly be heard but at the same time they could talk.

‘What about it?’ she asked again, watching him. ‘How do I make it worth your while?’

‘Don’t be daft, Loretta …’

But she wasn’t being daft. And he knew it.

The revealing attire, the improper pose, the Marilyn Monroe combo of sweet, innocent kid and pulse-pounding vamp.

‘Look … I don’t mean to imply anything, but …’ He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘I don’t have much cash on me.’

‘You’re paying your way by giving me a ride,’ she tittered. ‘I’m just wondering if I can return the favour.’

‘Don’t taunt me like that, love,’ he said, driving less than steadily. ‘You’ll make a sad old man even sadder.’

‘No, I’m serious,’ she responded. ‘I want to make it up to you any way I can. You’ll find I’m very broadminded.’

‘Yeah?’ Though it wasn’t really a question.

‘Look … just ahead there’s a turn,’ she said. ‘That’s a backroad. It leads to Abram eventually, but about half a mile along it there’s a lay-by for lorries and such. There’s a chippie van there during the day, but it’ll be closed at this hour. We could park up.’

He glanced at her wonderingly. Whatever he’d been about to say died on his tongue, his eyes diverting down to where the zip on her silver anorak had completely descended, exposing a deep, creamy cleavage, and then even further down, to where a pair of black stocking-tops were revealed, along with shiny clips and taut, white straps.

He looked again at her beautiful face, this time askance. And then he grinned. Broadly if somewhat disbelievingly. ‘Is this for real?’

‘Maybe. You’ll have to find out.’

And if nothing else, he was keen to do that. Which was why she was now three quarters of the way across an empty field, with the darkling trees in front and Ronnie Ford about fifty yards behind.

‘Loretta?’ he called, huffing and puffing as he attempted to follow. ‘Come on, eh?’

He wasn’t just unfit, he was clearly unhealthy. Just climbing over the stile appeared to have sapped him of energy. Perhaps it would be necessary to give him further encouragement. The wood stood in front of her, the path leading into it through a natural archway amid the nearest trees. As soon as she entered, and was fleetingly out of view, the woman hiked her skirt up and slipped her lacy white knickers down, stepping nimbly out of them and hanging the garment on a nearby twig.

Giggling again, she hurried on into the darkness. Any reservations he might still have harboured ought to evaporate completely now.

‘Loretta?’ He tried to make a joke of it as he breathlessly entered the wood. ‘As you’ve seen, I’m approaching the autumn of my years. I might be like a fine vintage wine, but I can’t chase around the countryside anymore.’

She watched him from about forty yards in front, from behind the clump of rhododendrons she’d been looking for on the left side of the path.

Approximately five yards into the trees, he stopped and pivoted round. Suddenly wary.

She wondered what he was thinking.

A blue murk was spreading amid the gnarled stanchions of the trunks. Here and there, ground-level bushes hung heavy with dew. There was a reek of woodland decay, of fungus and leaf-mulch. All was deathly still.

It looked as if he was about to start retreating. But then he stopped short.

Ten yards to his right, he’d spotted the pair of knickers suspended from their twig.

Hurriedly, he lumbered over there, fingers twitching, apparently eager to fondle that soft, pliable material.

Yeah … so much for the avuncular uncle.

He yanked the garment down and spread it out in two hands, to check its authenticity no doubt. Then he folded it into a small, neat square and inserted it into his left hip pocket, before ambling back to the path and proceeding along it towards her, penetrating deeper into the ever-gloomier trees but now with a big lewd grin on his mug.

She’d have laughed aloud if it wouldn’t have given her away.

The poor stupid sod really thought he was going to get some.

Chapter 2

The Hatchwood Green estate was a sinkhole even by the standards of Crowley, which was one of Greater Manchester’s most deprived boroughs. It had been constructed in the 1950s, along with the rest of the district’s many council estates, though this was one of the largest, having been built on extensive brownfield land – a site formerly occupied by the long defunct Manchester Railway Company – and in so many ways it embodied the decline of the council housing dream in post-war Britain.

Brand-new, spacious living accommodation for Crowley’s working class had soon turned sour for its residents as they’d found themselves isolated from the town centre and other amenities, and often from jobs. More to the point, this new community was broken from the outset, as its members had already sacrificed the old social networks they’d formerly built up in order to move. Follow that with decades of neglect, the gradual deterioration of cheaply built properties due to their having exceeded their expected lifetimes, and the increased and often twin ravages of drugs and crime, and you were left with a truly depressing environment. Years later, even with right-to-buy in force, Hatchwood Green still had the aura of desolation and menace.

To PC Lucy Clayburn’s jaundiced eye – and she couldn’t help but see it this way as a copper – there was something inherently soul-destroying about these immense, sprawling housing estates: all the domiciles built from the same red brick, their doors existing in repeating patterns of pale blue, pale red or pale yellow; the patches of grass between them boasting no other distinguishing features – no trees, no bushes, no flowerbeds – though they occasionally hosted the relics of kiddies’ playgrounds. And of course, when they had dropped into disrepair, as this one had, with dilapidated housing and broken fences, their inhospitable aura reached a new low.

So it was with the usual air of stoic boredom that, one Wednesday night, she and PC Malcolm Peabody, the twenty-year-old probationer she’d been puppy-walking for the past couple of months, drove their liveried BMW saloon onto the Hatchwood, to attend 24 Clapgate Road in response to a reported domestic.

This house was in no better or worse state than those around it: a small front garden, which was mainly a trash heap (though it hadn’t used to be, Lucy recalled), a rotted gate hanging from its hinges and thick tufts of weed growing through the lopsided paving along the front path. They could hear the hubbub inside as soon as they pulled up. When they actually entered – the house’s front door having opened immediately to Lucy’s firm, no-nonsense knock – the interior looked as if a bomb had hit it, though it was difficult to tell whether this was a new mess or just the usual one. Dingy wallpaper and mouldering carpets implied the latter, but it was hard to make out whether the bits of strewn underwear, or the beer tins, dog-ends and other foul bric-a-brac, were recent additions. The atmosphere, of course, was rancid: a mingled fetor of sweat, cigarettes, booze and ketchup – which was sad as well as sickening, Lucy thought, because again, that hadn’t always been the case at this address.

The occupants were Rob and Dora Hallam, he a displaced and unemployed Welshman, she a local lass who’d recently been sacked from her supermarket job for being light-fingered. They were both in their late thirties, though they looked older: ratty-haired, sallow-faced, gap-toothed. Rob Hallam was short, stumpy and overweight, Dora thin to the point of emaciation, her facial features sunken as though the very bone structure was decaying. At present he was wearing Y-fronts, a vest and a pair of dirty socks. She was in flip-flops, pyjama bottoms and a Manchester United shirt.

Both were streaming blood, Rob from a split eyebrow and gouged left cheek, Dora from a burst nose, which as she sniffled into a handkerchief, continued to discharge itself in a constant succession of sticky crimson bubbles.

The main set-to looked to have occurred in the lounge. That was where most of the wrecked furniture and broken glass was congregated. The door connecting the lounge to the kitchen, which now lay wrenched from its hinges against an armchair, was also a giveaway. But whatever violence had erupted before, it was over now, primarily because the combatants were too exhausted to continue. They stood apart, one at either side of the room, panting, glaring. In between them, quite surreally, the television played away to itself, screening the crazy antics of Cow and Chicken.

‘So what am I going to do with the pair of you?’ Lucy asked, having stood in stony silence during the predictable exchange of accusations and counter-accusations, and refusing to give a moment’s thought to Rob Hallam’s meandering explanation that the squabble had started over his wife’s ‘fucking stupid’ assertion that the Red Guy, Cow and Chicken’s nemesis, was supposed to be imaginary and not the real-life Devil.

‘You’ve got to arrest him,’ Dora whimpered, seemingly surprised that this hadn’t happened already.

‘Arrest him?’ Lucy said. ‘Dora … every time we try to arrest him, you either go ballistic as soon as we lay hands on him, or come rushing down to the station and insist he hasn’t done anything wrong.’

‘You can see that this time he has.’ Dora yanked her hair with bloodstained fingers. ‘Look at the state of me.’

‘And look at the state of Rob.’

‘But I had to defend myself …’

‘What did you use?’ Lucy asked. ‘A meat-grinder?’

Dora’s mouth dropped open, guppy-like with incomprehension.

‘The point I’m making, Dora,’ Lucy said, ‘is that you’re both as bad as each other. Every time you have a drink, you have a fight, usually over nothing … and you wake the whole neighbourhood up. And it’s not just every Friday and Saturday. Now it seems it’s weekdays too.’ She glanced at Rob. ‘And what’ve you got to say for yourself? And don’t give me some bollocks excuse about kids’ cartoons!’

Rob regarded her hollow-eyed. ‘She’s right. I need locking up. Even if she withdraws her complaint, you can do that, can’t you? You said that last time.’

‘That’s right, Rob … but this isn’t a straightforward assault, is it? You’re going to need at least as many stitches as she is. Your brief’ll have a field day. Unless I lock you both up, of course.’ Lucy knuckled her chin. ‘I could charge you both with wounding, breach of the peace, causing damage to council property … that might get a result.’

‘Both of us?’ Rob looked startled.

‘Both of us?’ Dora echoed, as if this had never been part of the plan.

‘It’s the age of equal opportunities, love,’ Lucy replied. ‘Spousal abuse works both ways these days.’

Dora’s mouth slackened into another bewildered gape.

‘Course,’ Lucy added, ‘ultimately, it’d be a waste of all our time, wouldn’t it? Not to mention expensive … when what you really need is to go and get some counselling.’ She stepped across the wreckage-strewn room, and took a framed photo from the cluttered mantelpiece. It depicted a little blond boy, smiling happily despite his missing front teeth. ‘When Bobbie died, it changed everything for you two, didn’t it?’

Rob slumped onto the couch. He shook a can, sipped out a last dreg and discarded it onto the floor. ‘I can’t remember a time before that,’ he said.

‘You need to try,’ Lucy replied.

In response, he reached into a carrier bag next to the couch, took out a fresh can and ripped it open.

‘What do you mean counselling?’ Dora asked.

‘Grief counselling,’ Lucy said. ‘Look, I know Bobbie’s death changed your lives, Dora, because I never had to come here in the middle of the night before then. But it’s five years ago, love. And it’s still tearing you apart. So you need some professional help. There’s something else. You need to stop hitting the pop.’ She snatched the can from Rob’s grasp and placed it on the mantel. ‘You can get some help for that too … but you’ve got to want it first.’

Rob gazed blearily up at her. ‘So … I’m not getting locked up?’

He seemed puzzled rather than relieved, though perhaps now that he’d calmed down a little, it was dawning on him that the advantages of being allowed to sleep in his own bed outweighed the disadvantages of being cooped up in a vomit-stained police cell.

‘That depends.’ Lucy indicated the broken door. ‘What about this?’

‘Suppose I can fix it.’

‘Definitely?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When?’

‘Soon as I get round to it.’

‘Not good enough, Rob. I’m back on duty tomorrow afternoon. I’ll make this my first port of call. Will it be fixed by then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Sure? Stare me in the eye and say it.’

‘Yeah,’ he said again, though he looked too haggard to be totally convincing.

‘Okay …’ Lucy pondered. ‘Before I leave here, I want a solemn promise from you two jokers that, for the rest of tonight … no, let’s not cheapen it … for the rest of this year, I won’t get a call-back to this address.’

‘Promise,’ Dora said quietly.

Rob nodded again.

‘You have to get some help, you understand?’

‘Yeah,’ he said.

Lucy knew they wouldn’t. It might be all quiet now, but in a few days’ time tempers would flare again over something completely ridiculous. The Hallams were too stuck in this rut, too damaged by events, too drunk on misery and hopelessness to effect any kind of change in their own fortunes. For anyone to keep proceeding down a dark, dank tunnel there had to be at least a flicker of light at the end. But in truth, Lucy didn’t really care a great deal. She couldn’t afford to. At times she was so tired out by these mini disasters in the lives of others that all she wanted to do was shut them down any way she could, even if it was only temporarily.

‘Alright …’ She put her radio to her lips. ‘1485 to Three, receiving?’

‘Go ahead, Lucy,’ Comms crackled back.

‘Yeah, I’m finished at Clapgate Lane. No offences revealed. All parties advised, over.’

‘Roger, thanks for that.’

‘That was so cool,’ Peabody said, as they climbed back into the panda.

‘Cool?’

‘The way you defused that situation.’

‘It defused itself.’ She put the car in gear. ‘They were too knackered to keep fighting.’

‘Yeah, but we could’ve locked them both up. Plenty of reason. Instead, you calmed it down, had a few words, put them right, spared them a difficult time …’

‘And saved us a raft of paperwork.’ Lucy drove them away from the kerb. ‘That was my main motivation.’

Peabody chuckled. ‘Can’t fool me. You just didn’t want to bring any more crap down on them … you’re getting soft-hearted in your old age.’

He was a rangy, raw-boned lad, red-haired and freckled, and to an outsider his tone might have seemed a tad impertinent given that Lucy was a ten-year veteran of the job and he’d only been in it a few months, but a few months on the beat in a town like Crowley counted for a lot. Even a few days spent side-by-side on the frontline could bond coppers together like no other job outside the military.

‘Well …’ Lucy swung them towards the south end of the estate. ‘It’s not like they haven’t had a lot to deal with.’

‘What happened to the kiddie, anyway?’

‘Run over.’

‘Christ!’