Lost Souls by Neil White Read Free Book Online Page A

something happens, a murder or something like that, he calls in with information, reckons he is some kind of psychic. He’s done the same with the abductions.’
    ‘Psychic?’
    Yusuf nodded again. ‘He told us to look near the railway.’
    ‘Is that it?’
    ‘He was warned off, so his calls stopped, but when I show you this, you’ll see why.’ He reached over to a binder and passed it to Laura. ‘I did some digging around after you went to see him.’
    ‘Were you on the abduction cases?’
    Yusuf nodded. ‘Logging calls, making lists of suspects, trying to cross-reference them. Speaking to the families, just listening out for something.’
    ‘But there wasn’t much to hear?’
    He shook his head. ‘No common theme, except that the kids were from bad families.’
    Laura took hold of the binder, and as she flicked through the papers she saw that it contained intelligence reports, all hole-punched and inserted precisely.
    ‘I’ve put them in chronological order,’ he said.
    Laura’s eyes twinkled with amusement. She’d already guessed that he probably had.
    ‘If you want me to get anything else for you, just ask,’ Yusuf continued, and then he blushed as she smiled back.
    ‘Thanks. I’d like that.’ She was about to walk away when she thought of something. ‘What are you doing on this case?’ she asked.
    ‘Calling friends of the victim,’ he said. ‘I break the news, and when they calm down I ask about her other friends, ex-boyfriends, new boyfriends, that kind of thing. Each call leads to another person, and I research every name I come across.’
    ‘Any other suspects?’
    Yusuf shook his head. ‘Not yet. She led a quiet life.Not many boyfriends, and no one on the scene at the moment, although her friends think there may have been someone getting close to her.’
    ‘Did any know Eric Randle?’
    ‘I didn’t ask specifically, but a few mentioned that she was a member of a club, used to meet every week, but no one knew much about it, as if she was embarrassed to talk about it.’
    Laura picked up the file and nodded her thanks. Back at her desk, she started to read.
    The first item was an intelligence report from the eighties. It was a warning that Eric Randle was a problem caller, that he would call the police with information, often about murders or missing children, not always local. He was warned off a few times because he got in the way, turned up at crime scenes, but over time he was regarded as a harmless nuisance and left alone.
    Laura leafed through a number of incident logs, created when Eric Randle called the police to provide information. They sounded vague, usually just some idea that someone was in danger. Most had ended with a quiet warning not to meddle.
    She looked up when she sensed Egan enter the room. She could hear Pete still sounding off about Randle. Egan didn’t say anything. He just listened, and then began to walk around the room asking if anyone had found anything new.
    Laura looked back at the folder, and then she saw something that made her forget all about Egan.
    Eric Randle had briefly been a suspect in a couple of prostitute murders around fifteen years earlier. Two girlshad gone missing from their usual beat, last seen getting into a dark-coloured saloon. They were found on some waste-ground near to the motorway, both stabbed and mutilated. The killer didn’t strike again, certainly not in Blackley, and the police thought that the attacker was maybe part of the travelling crowd. But they started to look at Eric Randle because he had called the police and told them things that they hadn’t released to the press. He would have been arrested, but he didn’t fit the profile. He was too old and had no criminal history.
    The killer was still at large.
    Laura put the file down and thought about that. Profiling was big back then—the
Cracker
years—and maybe too much weight was attached to it. Profiles never caught anyone. They just eliminated people, and sometimes