“Gary and Lou, you take the left of the building while Ash and I look to the right,” said Augustine, “there must be something here that gives us a clue to what we are working on. I don’t like the fact that someone else is in control.”
“We know that boss,” replied Gary who was now getting over his queasiness and returning to his normal atrocious self. He smiled as well as he could with his stomach still moving around like he had a ferret climbing inside. Augustine just ignored him and carried on with his instructions. Behind his back, the rest of the team were smiling at the fact Gary had been passed over by Augustine. They all wanted to do the same to him.
“Electra, speak to the forensic leader and find out when the post mortem is likely to happen. Then go into the building and see what you can find. I’m sure Caine will have a laptop or other device in there. See if there are any emails, letters or anything else that might give us a clue,” Augustine instructed. He loved the times when they could get down to business rather than push paper. Even though they were no further forward, it felt like something was happening. Activity always produced results, he told himself. He wasn’t sure whether he believed it.
“Boss, the building is closed and we can’t get access. We have spoken to the deputy of Britain Excelsior and he is refusing to come down. He doesn’t want to end up in the same state as Caine,” Electra explained.
“I don’t give a shit. Break the fucking doors down if you have to. We need to investigate. It’s the only way he will be safe in the long run. Tell him he’s got 20 minutes to get here or we will ‘unlock’ the doors ourselves,” Boyle shouted. The news helicopters were circling overhead and one came so close that the wind and noise made it difficult to be heard, let alone understood. “And get those bastards out of here,” he continued. The Augustine Boyle walked off. That was the signal for everyone to get on with their tasks. There were no specific instructions because there was nothing specific to look for. From the initial view, it looked as though the murder had taken place in one spot without a struggle. But the killer and victim must have travelled there and this might throw up some clues. Already Augustine had been watching the body language of the forensic team and it reminded him of the way they were in the alley with the girl. He felt that they had nothing to go on again, so it might be down to his detectives to find something that might give them a way in.
The four of them searched the area with torches to look for something that might produce a breakthrough. It was still dark in places, even though it had reached mid-morning and the torches allowed them to see what was on the ground. As with any major city, the streets were cleaned regularly and Electra had been told to find out from the city when the last clean had taken place while she waited for Caine’s deputy to arrive or the 20-minute deadline to expire. That would give them a timeframe for the pieces of litter and stray coins they were picking up, bagging and cataloguing. Electra returned to tell Gus that the streets were cleaned the previous night at around midnight. So, whatever was present in front of the building had only been there a matter of hours. To the untrained eye none of it looked significant. The headquarters of Britain Excelsior was situated at the end of Northumberland Street in the centre of Newcastle, in the building vacated by a coffee shop, which itself had taken over the premises from a pub. It was facing the direction of the breeze that was blowing the night before and was still present as Augustine looked through what they had found. But to someone who had done this before, there were a plethora of possibilities. The discarded sweet wrapper could have DNA from the killer, as could the cigarette butt. The 5 pence coin found near the gutter on the right of the building could have fallen from the pocket of the killer or the victim and have traces of body fluids on it. There wasn’t a lot of pieces picked up, but there was enough for the forensic team to look at in the lab.
The 20-minute deadline passed with no sign of the deputy of Britain Excelsior. Little did Augustine know at the time, but he was travelling in the opposite direction. The deputy had been through a series of blazing rows with Jeff Caine over the last few months and was looking to leave the party and set up on his own. Some of the secrets that he had learned about Caine while working with him were electric. The deputy had decided that this was the quickest way to set up his own political party and tried to extort money from Caine in exchange for his silence and the fact that he would leave the party quickly. Jeff Caine decided that the best way to deal with this attempted blackmail was to ignore his deputy. They hadn’t spoken in months and Caine was brewing in preparation for the next time they would be face to face. He planned and plotted the words that would come out of his mouth at their next meeting. The city wasn’t that big as though they would never bump into each other again. And when they did, Jeff Caine was going to let him have it.
12
Scott Sharpe threw some clothes into a suitcase and went to the airport. He didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t know what he should pack, but he thought it might look suspicious boarding a flight without luggage of any description. The murder of Jeff Caine happened too late to be on the front of the newspapers but he was sure that other passengers would have seen it on the TV news before they left home for the airport or would be looking at it on their smartphones while eating, shopping or wandering around. Those with at least a little interest in politics would probably recognise him as the deputy or Britain Excelsior, or the acting leader now that Caine was dead. He thought about disguises, trying to leave the country under a different name or going into hiding. But after a little thought, Scott Sharpe decided that just getting out of the country was the best course of action.
He had always found airport lounges the strangest of places. Nobody was there out of choice, all they were doing was waiting for a screen to tell them where to assemble for the flight. He didn’t like waiting around, and felt that he only had time to carry out all the necessary parts of his life, without the waits in between. It was even worse for him that someone else controlled the waits. It was like working with Jeff Caine all over again. He hated that bloke. When he first joined Britain Excelsior it was like a breath of fresh air. Scott had waited all his life to feel like he belonged. When he was young he never fitted in at any school. His parents moved around the country a lot so Scott felt like he was starting all over again at a new school every couple of years. He never got settled. He never liked being the new kid, but that was the role that he had to play time and time again. Scott watched while other kids played games on the school field in the summer months and the hard-concrete yard when the grass was wet. They enjoyed games that they had played together for years. Some were pretty obvious to Scott, like tag or football, but others in different corners of the country felt alien to him. He watched and tried to pick up the rules of the games but they seemed without rule. Some kids would be caught out by a particular move, while others would stay in the game for what seemed like the same move. He gave up watching and waiting for someone to invite him into their game. Scott spent the rest of his playtimes inside. He read a huge number of books but couldn’t tell you if any of it went in. Scott was the type of person to devour a book in a single sitting, but only be able to recall small parts of the book. Not everything in life had a meaning or a relevance to Scott. Much of it passed him by.
Working with Jeff Caine had become strained after around a year of being in the organisation. Jeff was welcoming of Scott’s ideas to begin with. He listened and consulted others on what Scott had to say. For his part, Scott had looked for an organisation that thought like him and acted like him. Britain Excelsior seemed just that organisation. But with anything, there is a public face and a private face. It is the same with people. We all show the side that we want the world to see. It is only when you get to know someone and scratch the surface that you understand what they are like behind closed doors.
To the public, Britain Excelsior seemed organised, dedicated to their cause and ready to act at a moment’s notice. Scott was attracted by this. In every job he ha
d previously worked, Scott was always drawn to the people as much as the company. He would do his research and then meet with the person who would be his boss. This way he could get a feel of how they would work together and if Scott was comfortable with the people he would spend 8 hours plus a day with. Three jobs in a row Scott thought he had found someone who shared his views and his passion. Three jobs in a row, the manager that he had decided was the perfect fit for him announced the fact that they were leaving their job in the first week of Scott’s employment. He was quite sure it wasn’t him. People needed time to go through all the motions involved with leaving a job. People needed time to let Scott get under their skin and persuade them that working somewhere else was better than looking at his face every day of the week.
But behind the scenes, Britain Excelsior was a chaotic group of people, loosely gathered under the control of Jeff Caine. He had put a lot of money into the organisation and expected a lot of control in return. Those that didn’t like it were quickly ushered out of the door. Those that wanted to stay had to toe the line and not steal any of the limelight from the leader. Those were the rules. Scott and Jeff were close initially but after Scott found out that none of his ideas were taken seriously, he pretty soon got pissed off with the way things were going. Jeff thought that Scott would be better inside the tent pissing out, and Scott didn’t want to give Jeff the pleasure of ousting him. So, they drifted apart and ran their own little empires within the organisation – Scott’s much littler than Jeff’s.
Scott walked through the terminal building slowly, keeping to the edges where there were fewer people and the light wasn’t as strong. He didn’t want to be seen, but thought that hiding in the toilets would just cause more suspicion. He wanted the next couple of hours to pass in the blink of an eye, so he could be on the plane and on his way out of here. When he arrived at the airport a couple of hours earlier, Scott Sharpe went to the booking desk for the first transatlantic airline he could find. For some reason, his mind kept telling him that Europe wasn’t far enough. He wanted to get away before the press started to hound Britain Excelsior and rip it apart. There were so many stories to tell, that he wasn’t sure which one they would go for first. Would it be the fact that he and Jeff were supposed to be leading the organisation and hadn’t spoken in months? Would it be the numerous affairs that Jeff had been having with the married members of his team? Would it be his own addiction to sex, and the huge number of prostitutes he had been using in the city over the recent months? Scott had received a tip-off from an old acquaintance in the press that the story was out there, waiting to be told. He had no idea how the press found out about him and prostitutes, but he wasn’t going to wait around to find out. Well, if these girls were willing to have sex for money, then they were also probably willing to sell their story for a bit of cash too. He had trusted them less and less over the previous weeks, but couldn’t stop the urges. There was one in particular that he felt would sell her story for only a few quid. She was European and Scott was sure she knew who he was. It would be quite a tale for one of the leaders of an anti-immigration, anti-Europe political party to be sleeping with a European sex worker. The last time he saw her Scott made her pay for her possible loose lips. She wouldn’t talk about him again, he was sure of it.
Scott Sharpe had a way with women normally, but as he got older he lost his touch. In his youth, he could have pretty much any woman he chose. Sometimes it was just for sex, on other occasions it was for a relationship. He wasn’t controlling but had something that women found hard to resist. Scott loved the attention and thrived in any situation where women and alcohol were involved. As the years passed he just didn’t know how to make the magic happen any longer. One of the issues was the fact that Scott aged, but his interest in women didn’t. He was still targeting the women in their early twenties that he was so successful with when he was the same age. Now that he was in his late thirties the women he looked for in the past were married with kids, and the ones he went after in the present just weren’t interested in a man nearly twice their age.
But he had aged well. He still had most of the looks that he carried around with him from his younger days, and with only a little extra baggage around the middle. Most of the people he knew of his time of life had succumbed to the ravages of age. Their faces had started to show the signs of wrinkles, their bodies were not as tight as when they were in their prime and their hair was receding at a rate of knots. For some reason, Scott had avoided all of these. When he went to the rare family occasion he was invited to attend, Scott always looked with great interest at the other men in the family to see where his genes came from. They all looked far older than their years and Scott looked far younger than his. Maybe he was adopted. Scott looked across at a group of early twenties who looked like they were heading for a hen do in a hot part of the world. If he wasn’t trying to keep his head down, then this would be the type of women he would be looking to talk to and hopefully take it further than just a talk. While his wife was still asleep in their home, Scott was heading for the other side of the world. He had chosen the Bahamas from the short list that the lady at the airline desk had given him. It was somewhere he had never been, somewhere he imagined he wouldn’t be known and was flying this morning. The last of these criteria was the most important of the three. He desperately wanted to get out of the country as soon as he could.
He went to the toilet to kill a bit of time and stretch his legs. He was well over six-foot-tall and this height meant his journeys by plane were uncomfortable to say the least. He looked in the mirror while he washed his hands. Scott had blond hair down to his shoulders and he could have easily passed for an Australian or Californian surfer if it wasn’t for the clothes he was wearing. He looked in the mirror and the worry lines came across his face. That’s the way to end up with wrinkles, he told himself. The only worry he had recently was the arguments he was having with Jeff Caine. They were not face-to-face any more, but across a series of emails. Scott had told Caine exactly what he thought of him to begin with. When Caine ignored everything that Sharpe threw at him, then he became angry. An email letting someone know that you don’t think a great deal of them as a human being is one thing. An email threatening to kill them was quite something else. Scott Sharpe had let his emotions run away with him and let Caine have it all.
Airports showcase the diversity of the world community. People assemble there from all over the globe for a few fleeting hours at a time and then go. They are all homogenised by the same airport staples no matter where you are in the world. Burger King. Duty Free. Travel Money. Expensive sandwiches. Poor quality coffee and traffic that rushes everywhere but goes nowhere. Scott tried to guess what country other travellers were from based on the clothes they wore, the food they ate and their mannerisms. He didn't get close enough to hear their voices. Staying at a distance meant he had less chance of being noticed. Less chance of being kept in this country.
Scott looked across at the glowing lights on the shops, bars and cafes and wondered whether that was a deciding factor in the selection of somewhere to spend money. Did a neon light indicate an attractive place to put a hand into a pocket and pull out a wad of notes? Was this linked to nature? Did our ancestors feel more relaxed in the moonlight?
By this point he only had around an hour to wait before his gate would be shown and he could begin to board. Scott was torn between being the first on the plane and having everyone else walk past him, where at least he could bury his head in a magazine, or being the last on the plane and having to walk past everyone else. He settled for being in the middle, when the chaos of finding a seat, putting boarding cards away and making sure you have all you need for a flight seemed to distract others enough that he wouldn’t be noticed in all the fuss. Then when the plane left the tarmac he thought he would be safe for a while at least. That was the plan, anyway. He went for a magazine all the same, so that he had something to bury his head in and keep away from prying eyes. Scott also thought it was
a clever idea to buy a hat for the same purpose so bought something he had never owned before – a baseball cap. With that covering the top half of his face by being pulled low, and the magazine doing the rest, Scott hoped to have a peaceful flight unseen from people recognising who he was. He wanted to get away as fast as he could and leave Britain behind for a while. He may have been the de facto leader of Britain Excelsior at that time but Britain was the last place on earth he wanted to be. It held so many risks for him.
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