The Assassin's Dog

by David George Clarke

  “Did I? Oh, yes.”

  Bugger, she must have that slip. Bloody race. Now she’d transferred to Nottingham, Jennifer would probably get all keen about it once again.

  “It’s not until the spring,” she ad libbed. “Plenty of time for training.”

  As she emptied the contents of her glass, she remembered what he’d been telling her.

  “Do you really run every morning?”

  “Yes, like I said, there’s a network of waterways around here, irrigation channels and so on. Several of them have paths alongside that make great running tracks, and they’re flat, for the most part.”

  Gus removed the top of the third bottle. “A top-up?” he said.

  “I will if you will,” she said, suppressing a boozy giggle and holding up her glass.

  The glasses generously filled, Gus put the bottle down and leaned towards Trisha, raising his glass. “Cheers, Emma,” he said, as she responded by leaning in his direction and clinking his glass. “Here’s to the storm.”

  As if in direct response, a flash in the sky outside was followed immediately by a deafening crash of thunder. They both laughed.

  “Long may it last,” said Trisha.

  Then, suddenly, they were kissing.

  “Wait,” said Trisha, pulling back. He looked at her, briefly puzzled until he saw she was taking his wine glass and putting it out of harm’s way next to where somehow she had already placed hers.

  “Better,” she said, and both arms were around his neck and the kissing became deeper and stronger, while very quickly hands were moving, exploring, stroking, and her bathrobe fell from her shoulders.

  “Is it as warm in your bedroom?” she murmured.

  “Oh, yes. Deliciously so.”

  “Then let’s go there. I need to be horizontal.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  At six the following morning, the relentless drumming in Gus’s head that had been dragging him into a reluctant semi-consciousness was temporarily swamped by the insistent shrill of his bedside alarm.

  “Fuck it,” he mumbled as a practised arm swung towards the alarm and silenced it. But the drumming continued and was getting louder.

  “Aargh!” he growled as his hand reached for his neck and tried to squeeze the pain into submission. His eyes opened slowly, grateful for the weak light from a sky still full of cloud after the previous night’s storm. His first thought was a simple fact: he couldn’t possibly go for his morning run. His second was a question: why was he in this state? Gradually, the events of the night before filtered into his mind, and in spite of the drumming, he smiled and flipped onto his side.

  The other half of the bed was empty, although there was a depression in the pillow next to his.

  Bathroom, he thought.

  He sat up. He was naked, which confirmed he’d had company. He tried to focus on the room. In an untidy heap near the door was the bathrobe that … what was her name? Emily? Emma? Yes, Emma … that Emma had been wearing when he half-carried her to the bedroom. He smiled, remembering how the bubble of concern he’d had over her falling asleep once they lay on the bed had burst as she immediately rolled on top of him and began hungrily removing his clothes.

  Taking a deep breath, he rotated his shoulders and stretched his neck, twisting and rolling his head to ease the drumming. Better. He checked the time. What had she said? She had a nine o’clock in Nottingham? It was only a half-hour drive, so perhaps …

  He stood and pulled on his own bathrobe, steadied himself and walked over to the bathroom to knock on the closed door.

  “Emma?”

  Nothing. Perhaps not wanting to disturb him, she had gone to use one of the other bathrooms. Then he remembered that all her clothes had been through the wash and left in the drier. She was probably downstairs, unless she’d buggered off. It had happened before.

  He pulled the curtain back. It had finally stopped raining, and, yes, there was her red Golf behind his car. Just as well they didn’t have neighbours. He smirked at the thought; it was one of the advantages of living where they did when Mo was away.

  After checking the other two upstairs bathrooms, Gus went down to the kitchen, but there was no sign of Emma. He flicked on the kettle before walking along the corridor to the downstairs guest room.

  “Emma? Good morning. Are you there? Would you like some tea?”

  No response.

  In the bedroom, he saw Emma’s overnight bag was on the bed and the bathroom door slightly ajar.

  “Emma? Everything all right?”

  He knocked on the door and slowly pushed it open. “Emma?”

  But the bathroom was empty, just the remains of her activities evident from the night before where she’d showered and tidied herself up. Herself, he thought, but not the bathroom. Still, there was plenty of time for that.

  Returning to the kitchen, he picked up an empty wine bottle from the surface of the island unit and tossed it in the pedal bin as he walked to the half-open utility room door. He peered into the room. Emma wasn’t there. Puzzled now, Gus strode over to the washer and drier and pulled open their doors. The washer was empty but in the drier were what looked like all the things he’d washed along with Emma’s.

  He pulled out the tangled heap of clothes and separated them into his and hers. Jeans, top, cotton jumper, panties and bra. Everything she’d been wearing, as far as he knew. The jacket she’d grabbed from her car while he’d been changing the wheel had, he thought, been tossed onto a peg as they came into the cottage, her wet shoes kicked off nearby.

  Frowning now, he went back into the kitchen and looked over to the outside door. Emma’s jacket was on the peg, a small puddle of water still on the floor beneath it. He had meant to give the jacket a shake and hang it up, but he’d forgotten, as had Emma, who, he now realised, had been far more interested in cleaning herself up, getting warm and dragging him to bed. A memory of their energetic romp flashed across his mind. She was quite something; definitely someone to keep in touch with.

  If he could find out where she was.

  Seeing her jacket reminded him that with her clothes still in the drier and the bathrobe she’d been wearing on his bedroom floor, she had nothing to wear. Perhaps she’d dressed in whatever she had in her overnight bag. Dressed for her meeting, that must be it. So, where was she? Had she gone for a walk?

  He checked the kitchen door, only to find it locked and the key hanging up in its normal place on a hook near the coats. He ran through the hall to the sitting room where the old main door to the house was situated, the one they seldom used. The lock was a Yale and its button was down, as usual. She couldn’t have gone out that way.

  On the way back to the kitchen, he went into the downstairs guest room and unzipped Emma’s overnight bag. Apart from a space where she’d pulled out a washbag, everything else was neatly folded and looked undisturbed. It seemed extremely unlikely that she’d removed anything from it. Which must mean that she was still somewhere in the house and either naked or wrapped in a towel she’d grabbed from somewhere.

  He smiled as the solution occurred to him: she’d got up, gone to the master bathroom for a pee and dozed off. She would certainly have been blurry. After their first half hour in bed, they had paused to get yet another bottle of wine, and although she’d been almost legless, she’d still demanded more and more from him once they were back between the sheets.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Several hours earlier, Trisha had been forced awake by her bladder. She had somehow remembered to drink two large glasses of water. She didn’t know exactly when, but she thought it was probably before she and the man now snoring next to her had staggered up the stairs and set about each other in a ridiculous drunken passion.

  She half fell out of the bed, self-conscious without any clothes and wanting to wrap herself in the bedsheet. But she couldn’t, it would disturb … what was his name? Mark? Martin? No, Mart. In fact, she doubted his name was Mart any more than hers was Emma Carrington. So wh
at? She needed to pee.

  She staggered around the end of the bed, forcing her legs to work. Christ! How much had they had to drink? But through the blur of her memory was a feeling that whatever followed had been fun. Her arms, legs and thighs were certainly aching and her face felt raw. Why didn’t men shave these days? As she passed a chest of drawers, she reached out to steady herself, but her hand fell onto something soft and leathery that slipped on the polished wooden surface rather than resisting. Her hand went with it and, already unbalanced, she fell, thumping one knee against the drawers.

  “Shit!” she cried, and immediately threw a hand over her mouth, hoping she hadn’t woken up Mart-or-whatever-he-was-called. Sitting on the floor, her eyes trying to focus in the gloom, she saw the leathery object that had caused her fall. A wallet. A wallet! She’d have a look inside, ever the nosy copper.

  Snatching the wallet from the carpet, she opened it to peer at the contents. It looked like the usual collection of bank cards, driving licence and membership cards. She couldn’t tell; it was too dark and the spinning room wasn’t helping.

  Keeping hold of the wallet, she groped for the edge of the chest of drawers and pulled herself first to her knees and, after a breather, to her feet.

  She tried to stand upright, but the urge to pee was too strong. Stooping slightly, she hobbled towards the bathroom, pushed open the door and went in, closing the door behind her.

  “Hmm,” she slurred, as she leaned against the door. “That was a mistake. Can’t see a bloody thing. Shit! The sodding light switch is outside.”

  Her arms not fully in control, she was waving haphazardly at the wall behind her looking for the door handle when an array of soft lighting filled the space to her left. She turned her blurred eyes towards the lights. Controlled by a sensor near the door, they were mounted beneath a row of wall cupboards above a pair of round, plain-glass washbasins set in a slab of white marble. She frowned at the marble slab. At first glance, it seemed to be hanging in space. The improbability of it distracted her and, grabbing the rim of one of the washbasins, she sank to her knees to look underneath.

  “Ah,” she mumbled, “concealed brackets. Very swish.”

  She tried to sit back on her heels, but her balance still wasn’t working and she slipped sideways, her head banging against the marble sheet.

  “Shit!” she slurred as she dropped the wallet and lifted a hand to rub her head. She looked up, vaguely aware of a large shower cubicle to her right. Her head wobbled and her eyes fell again on the wallet.

  “OK, Mr Burton. Let’s see who you really are.”

  This time there was enough light to read the cards. She pulled out a credit card. Fergus J Brooke. She frowned. Why did that name ring a bell? Next among the cards was his driving licence, which gave the same name and an address in Rappington, Notts. She’d seen a sign to Rappington the previous evening and Mart-now-known-to-be-Fergus had mentioned the name too. But why was the name Brooke so familiar?

  She glanced at the other cards. They all had the same information. She opened the wallet’s main section to see that next to a number of ten- and twenty-pound notes were several business cards. She pulled one out and held it up.

  But before she even got as far as the name, her stomach was turning somersaults of anguish. There, in dark blue on the card’s pale blue background, was a crest. A police crest. Nottinghamshire Constabulary. She clenched her teeth, a wave of panic threatening to drown her. No! Please, God. No!

  But no amount of pleading to any deity would ever change what was printed on the card.

  Fergus J Brooke

  Detective Constable

  Serious Crime Formation

  She stared at the name, the awful reality of her predicament setting her pulse racing. She had screwed one of her junior officers before he even officially became one. Did that make it better? Of course it didn’t, you stupid, stupid bitch. You simply didn’t do this, not if you wanted to maintain some semblance of self-respect. Or integrity. Or authority. Or your job.

  Brooke. Now she remembered. Jennifer had talked about him. Cocky bugger, she’d said, known as Gus, a bit of a player. Well, he was certainly that. Wait — hadn’t Jennifer also said he was married? Yes, she had. Definitely.

  Trisha tried hard to focus her thoughts, but the red wine was still sloshing through her system, confusing her brain. She couldn’t think straight as a thousand fragmented thoughts whirled in her head.

  “Hang on,” she said, slurring no less than before, “suppose the wallet isn’t Mart’s. Perhaps he found it, or nicked it. That would be good.”

  Eagerly she snatched at the driving licence and held it up to look at the photo. Bugger. It was him. Burton was Brooke.

  She threw the wallet angrily across the floor. It would have to be Plan B. Blackmail. Brooke was married. How much was his marriage worth? She looked around, still trying to focus. This place was pretty well set up and would have cost far more than a DC’s salary could run to. His wife must have a good job; perhaps all this had been done with her money. He wouldn’t want to give that up.

  She’d wake him up, shake some consciousness into him and read him the riot act. She was his boss now, for Christ’s sake. They’d work something out; it was in both their interests.

  But more than anything, right now she really did need to pee.

  She reached up to the edge of the marble and hauled herself to her feet, the room swirling around her again. She opened her eyes as wide as she could, stretching the muscles, willing them to focus and her head to calm down. She took a breath followed by a tentative step. The loo was mounted on a raised part of the floor like the one in the downstairs bathroom, the design feature Mart had been so proud of. But this one seemed higher.

  After her first step, she felt more confident and leaning forward to let the marble slab take her weight through her arms, she took a second. Expecting her foot to find the tiled floor, she was surprised to find it was soft. But she was committed and her weight continued to apply pressure onto whatever she’d trodden on. The wallet slipped backwards, taking Trish’s foot with it. She stumbled, and with no more marble slab to grab, she fell heavily forward, her face crashing into the edge of the bath, all but breaking her nose.

  She slid to the floor, letting out a yelp rather than a scream, one hand attempting to support her in a twisted sitting position while the other grasped her nose. The hand on her nose filled with blood.

  “Bugger! No!” she whimpered. “This can’t be happening.”

  She looked around through a blur of tears and blood, the dizziness still playing tennis with her head making her see double. She was aware of towels on a shelf near her face. She grabbed one and wadded it onto her nose, yelping again at the pain.

  Ahead of her was the raised floor with the bidet and loo. The loo. If she didn’t get there now, she’d be peeing all over the floor.

  She flopped over onto her knees and grabbed the edge of the bath. Panting, she reached out for the steps, climbing them on her hands and knees like a toddler learning to walk. Once she was on the raised floor, she grasped the rim of the bidet and dragged herself to a standing position, reaching out for the tiled wall in an attempt to steady herself. Still wobbling, but confident now she could take the final step to reach the loo, she let go of the wall and, forgetting the damage to her nose, took a deep breath. A wave of pain shot through her head and the room began to spin faster than before.

  Confused and needing to balance, she swung her foot behind her, but there was nothing for it to find except space; she was too close to the steps.

  The raised part of the floor was almost two feet above the main bathroom floor, unnecessarily high, its inherent danger never once occurring to Gus Brooke. He thought it looked cool and there was, after all, plenty of wall to hold on to. Two extra feet meant the top of Trisha’s head was now over seven feet from the main bathroom floor and as she tumbled backwards from the edge of the raised floor, by the time her skull crashed into the five-centimetr
e-high lip of the shower tray, the speed of her fall was enough for the impact to be fatal.

  She didn’t cry out. After the dull thud of bone on tile, her body collapsed almost silently across the bathroom floor, the blood from the new injury mixing on the tiles with the blood still oozing from her nose.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Emma?”

  Gus knocked again on the bathroom door.

  “Emma. Are you asleep in there?” He tried to inject some lightness into his voice, amusement to counter the inevitable embarrassment she would feel knowing she’d crashed out on the bathroom floor. Curled up next to the loo, perhaps, or in the bath. Whatever. They’d be laughing about it over coffee in half an hour or so. Or perhaps giggling about it in bed.

  He put his ear to the door. “Emma, I’m coming in. Is that OK?”

  Nothing, not a peep. The wine had certainly knocked her for six.

  He reached out for the handle but stopped as a thought crossed his mind. If Emma was lying naked, spreadeagled across the floor, she’d be more than embarrassed to think he might have been getting an eyeful. If was different when they were in bed, different rules. This was the cold light of day. Well, dawn.

  There were towels on the shelves, but grabbing one of those might be too late if she roused as he entered the room. He looked around and saw the bathrobe on the bedroom floor, the one she’d been wearing the previous evening and looked so sexy in. He smiled at the memory.

  He hurried across the room and picked up the bathrobe. He could either throw over her or hold it up so she could slip into it. That would add to the chivalrous image she’d had of him when he’d rescued her in the storm.

  “Emma! I’m coming in now. Ready?”

  Taking the silence as acceptance, he pushed open the door and all but collapsed in shock. There was blood everywhere. A huge pool on the floor around and beyond Emma’s head and spatter all over the bath and walls near her body.