It grates on his nerves. He feels cheated of a proper goodbye. But more than that, he can’t help wondering if, despite Leighton’s prediction, poor June is lying on a metal table somewhere awaiting the post-mortem knife. He remembers how much she hated the mortuary when he took her there and determines to try to move things along.
He is so pre-occupied, he almost misses the scratches around the lock on his car door. Instinctively he checks under the car and only when that is clear does he peer through the window to look for anything suspicious. When he finally unlocks the car, all seems to be as he left it. But suddenly Truce has a nagging feeling that June’s missing body may be the least of his problems.
CHAPTER 9
“Local kids,” says Leighton when Truce relates the day’s events back home.
“Local kids stole June’s body? Have you been smoking something dodgy in my flat?”
Leighton folds double. The sofa trembles with his laughter. “Now there’s an interesting way to earn a ransom. Your victim certainly wouldn’t put up a struggle. I doubt it’s even a crime!”
Truce looks at him in disgust. “Of course it is. Have you never heard of Burke and Hare?”
Leighton shakes his head. “You’ve got the wrong men. They were serial killers. This country’s best. But yeah, I suppose the resurrectionists got jailed. You sure it’s still a crime?”
“Yes,” says Truce. “Don’t go thinking stealing corpses would be an easy way for you to contribute to the rent.”
“You wouldn’t turn your old buddy in, would you?” says Leighton in a terrible Irish accent.
Truce reaches for the whisky bottle. “Why are you trying to distract me with nonsense?”
Leighton’s grin fades. He swings his legs down from where he was lying on the sofa, and leans forward over the coffee table to face Truce. “Because, mate, I think you’re chasing ghosts.” Truce scowls and opens his mouth to speak. Leighton holds up a hand, forestalling him. “I don’t mean literally. I don’t think you saw June’s ghost the other night. I mean,” he takes a deep breath, and wipes his hand across his face, “This is difficult for me to say, mate, but I think you have some serious guilt issues about people who have died recently. You need to get yourself in check or things are going to get bad. Real bad.” He keeps his gaze level with Truce’s, and it is Truce who looks away first.
He shakes his head, as if to rid his mind of unpleasant thoughts, lowers his eyes to the bottle, and unscrews the top.
Leighton waits, but Truce continues to pour his drink as if Leighton isn’t there.
“Mate, you’re looking for conspiracies that don’t exist. Scratches on your car? Local kids looking for a joy ride. And June, no matter what her beloved family say, was probably back on the sauce. She’d been having some trying times, and then a stroke of good fortune — it’d test the best of us. Probably told herself she’d only have one glass, but once she had a taste of the sweet nectar, she was away. There’s a reason AA members talk about ‘One day at a time.’ It’s bloody easy to fall off the wagon. For all we know, June was tipsy when she took that dratted dog for a walk.”
Truce sips his drink, ignoring Leighton.
“It’s not your fault, mate. None of it.”
Without comment, Truce stands up, walks through to the bedroom, and shuts the door.
***
The next morning, there is no sign of Leighton at breakfast, nor any smell of his kippers. Truce stomps around the flat getting ready, but still no Leighton. He slams the front door as he leaves and drives aggressively to work, arriving twenty minutes early, having frightened several drivers on the way.
The Bob is not at his desk. But there’s a neatly propped-up black card indicating the station is on the highest level of alert. Truce picks up the card and hurls it across the room before storming through to the main offices. As he suspected, because the Bob is away from his desk, the buzz-through doors have been set to automatically open.
The open-plan office is almost deserted. Truce knows it will fill up quickly in the next ten minutes. He goes up to Rose’s office door and raises his hand to knock.
“She’s not in yet.” Wendy’s voice echoes from behind. Truce turns to see her sitting at the back of the room. It’s a sunny day, and she’s chosen one of the best desks to keep her in the shade. Her hair is pinned up, leaving her neck bare. She’s wearing oblong, rimless reading glasses he hasn’t seen before. That and her smart silk blouse make her look the epitome of professionalism, while still exuding a subtle femininity. Truce registers this, but it stirs no emotion. He even notices the slight raise of her eyebrows that suggests she is pleased to see him.
“Looking at your face, that might be just as well,” she adds. “Not for Rose, but for your career.”
Truce gives her a terse nod and sits down at a desk across the room. He’s barely shifted through his new emails before Wendy reappears and hands him a cup of coffee.
She perches on the edge of his desk. “What’s up?” she asks, tilting her head to the side in concern.
“We’re on black alert, and the bloody front door is open,” snarls Truce. “What a joke. You people wouldn’t know an alert until it was all over.”
“Hmm,” says Wendy, “that’s bad. But I don’t think anyone here is taking the alert very seriously. Maybe we should be, but that kind of trouble rarely reaches us.”
“It only takes one misjudgement,” says Truce angrily.
“I agree,” says Wendy. “Let me speak to Rose about it.”
“If you’d been the places I’ve been,” continues Truce. “If you knew what it was like to really be on an alert. For there to be imminent threats, to understand those risks and still work on … If you had any idea …” He stares into his coffee. He lifts the cup slightly. “Thank you for this.”
“I’m sure coming from the military, and having been so recently stationed in the places of unrest …”
“The Middle East will always be in unrest,” mutters Truce.
“We must seem rather like …”
“Children playing at being grown-ups,” Truce finishes for her.
“I consider myself suitably chastised,” says Wendy, “and I’ll speak to Rose and Herbert about it.”
“Herbert?”
“The Bob, as you obscurely call him.”
“Ah,” says Truce and turns back to his machine. Wendy remains where she is and asks softly. “So, what’s really wrong?”
“Trying to psych me out, doc?” says Truce, not bothering to keep the irritation out of his voice.
“We’re all colleagues here, Daniel,” says Wendy. “Part of the point of this unit is that we co-operate and share our diverse skills.”
Her voice is completely reasonable, her face mild and relaxed. Only by the flutter of her heartbeat at her throat does Truce see that her heart is going faster than it should. She’s worried. Afraid? Afraid of him or for him? He doesn’t know.
He looks up into her eyes. “It was a nice touch giving me a cup of coffee first,” he says. “I’ve never understood why handing someone a warm cup makes them more susceptible to you when you speak, but I’ve used the trick myself. It really works.”
Wendy blushes. “I didn’t do that consciously,” she says. “But if this is you in a lighter mood, I’m glad I did.” She pauses. “You went to Mrs Mills’ funeral yesterday, didn’t you?”
“How likely is it that an alcoholic will relapse?” says Truce.
“How long is a piece of string?” says Wendy. “I couldn’t even begin to guess.”
Truce tells her everything. The morning shift starts to fill up the desks around them, but his only response is to lower his voice and allow Wendy to move in closer. She takes a notepad from his desk and starts scribbling. When he is finished, she puts it down on his desk with a sigh.
“You’re not asking the right questions,” she says. “It’s not whether the bingo win might have set her off — to be honest, from my extremely limited knowledge of her, I’d
say that was unlikely.”
Truce sits up straighter in his chair.
“But,” continues Wendy, “it’s more a question of whether the strain of either seeing an actual murder AND not being believed, or thinking she’d seen a murder AND not being believed, coupled with her fear of dementia, sent her over the edge.”
“So, if she thought she saw something very disturbing like a murder — that might be enough, let alone the fact everyone told her she was barmy might have been enough?”
“Possibly,” says Wendy. “But you can’t discount that something earlier had thrown her off balance and maybe she had been drinking the night she walked the dog. That, the dim light, plus her ageing eyesight, might have caused her to ‘see’ something that simply didn’t happen.”
“So, you can give me reasons why she might have been drinking before the first incident, after it, but not after the bingo?”
“Pretty much,” says Wendy. “It’s hardly a clear picture. There’s simply too much unknown.”
“And the missing body?”
“If it is missing,” says Wendy. “There may have been personal, religious, medical, or even anatomical reasons why she didn’t have a coffin. You didn’t ask anyone about it, and you were the only person who seemed surprised it wasn’t there. That sort of suggests everyone else, including her family, were okay with its absence. And it’s not as if they didn’t know you were a policeman. If they’d had any complaints, it would have been easy enough to raise them with you.” She pauses and grimaces slightly. “Do you not think you might be jumping to conclusions?”
“You’re saying I should let this go?”
Wendy grimaces slightly and her hand flutters to the base of her throat in a nervous gesture. “As a profiler, Truce, I don’t have enough information to draw any kind of conclusion. But no one is asking me as a profiler, because no one but you thinks there has been a crime committed.”
Truce’s temper rises. “So I’m the nut?”
Wendy reaches out a hand towards his shoulder. She holds it there a moment above his skin, but hesitates to touch him. It’s like I’m a time bomb, thinks Truce.
“It’s not that, Daniel,” Wendy sighs. “I’m concerned, as a friend, that this case is starting to obsess you. I admit it’s an occupational hazard. It’s happened to me. It happens to just about everyone on the force. And when it does, my training tells me it’s because the case means something personal to us. That’s why we sometimes can’t let go. And sometimes that reason is nothing to do with the case at all. Please just consider that. I’m asking as a friend, not a colleague. I’m worried about you.”
Truce registers that Wendy is continuing to talk, but he loses the thread of what seems to be a plea. Everything blurs. He’s distracted by seeing Leighton standing on the far side of the desk. Truce stalks over to his roommate.
“How the hell did you get in here?” he demands, leaving Wendy behind him.
“The Bob let me in,” says Leighton. “I need a word.”
“What, without any ID?”
“What are you talking about?” says Leighton. It’s only then that Truce registers that Leighton looks different. The buzz-cut, the clean-shaven face, and the MP uniform. “Look, mate, you have to stop beating yourself up. You had no way of knowing he’d go AWOL from the infirmary. Hell, even the doc said he’d sedated him to the eyeballs. It’s. Not. Your. Fault.”
“We should have stopped him getting off base,” says Truce.
“Someone fucking should've,” says Leighton. “But you weren’t even on duty.”
“I signed him in to the infirmary. I left him there.” Truce feels himself begin to tremble. In the background, he hears a woman’s voice.
“You did it all by the book,” Leighton says. “There’ll be an investigation, and it won’t be pretty, but no one is suggesting you’re at fault. The guys on hospital security detail? Them, I wouldn’t like to be.”
“He was my prisoner. It was my decision to check him in with the medics.”
“Jesus, Uneasy,” says Leighton, shaking his head. “The guy was in bits. He shot a fucking child. Of course he was going out of his mind. He’s got kids himself, you know.”
“He admitted to being at fault,” Truce mumbles to himself. “He said he didn’t have a clear line of sight. He mistook the shadow. He said he’d never have fired at a child, whether the kid had a gun or not. I was sure he was sincere. I didn’t think he was a flight risk.”
“Exactly,” says Leighton putting his hand on Truce’s shoulder. “I’ve had a couple of run-ins with the guy myself. Don’t know him well. But he’s decent. A family man. I’ve no doubt he wasn’t a flight risk when you handed him over. Either the doc said something or gave him something that changed that. You did the right thing.”
Truce shakes his head. He doesn’t brush Leighton’s hand from his shoulder. He knows his friend means well, and the gesture of support is appreciated. “But it doesn’t make sense …” he trails off. “That’s it!” he says abruptly. “It’s the only possible answer.”
“What?” says Leighton, knitting his ginger eyebrows in concern. Truce hears the trepidation in his voice.
“From what you’ve said, and what I observed, the only reason this man would flee the base would be to do something he wouldn’t be able to do after he’d been sentenced, right?”
“I suppose,” says Leighton, cocking his head on one side. “Uneasy, you’re good at reading people’s body language. But you’re not a mind reader.”
“He’s gone to fucking apologise. He’s gone to find the family and apologise.”
“Fucking hell,” says Leighton involuntarily. “No one is that stupid. The situation out there is too volatile. You’d have to be suicidal to try something like that.”
“A good guy. A family man. Someone who has accidentally shot a child. You think he isn’t suicidal? Consciously or not, I’m betting that man wants to atone, even if he thinks it’ll cost him his life. He won’t want to live with what he’s done.”
“Fuck,” says Leighton. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. We need to get a team together. It’s not just his life on the line. If he does that, this whole situation could implode. Fucking FUBAR.”
“There’s no time. I have to go after him.”
Leighton finally takes his hand away. “You can’t. Have you seen what it’s like outside the base? Haven’t you heard the protests?”
“All the more reason for me to go alone. I’ll go in civvies. I’ll be discreet. If I go now, maybe I can get him back before this turns into an international disaster.”
“I’m coming with you,” says Leighton.
“No,” says Truce.
“Of course I fucking am,” says Leighton. “You’d never let me go out there alone, and there’s no way I’m letting you go solo, either.”
Truce looks his friend in the eyes and knows there is no arguing with him. “Okay,” he says. “The two of us.”
“As always,” says Leighton, “the two fucking musketeers. We’ve got to find a third. It’s getting embarrassing.”
Truce wants to smile in response, but his body is shaking. His head jerks backwards and he bites his tongue.
Hands are grasping at his collar. Someone is trying to force his mouth open. His arms and legs are restrained under pressure. Let him go! he hears a woman's voice. He wants to agree. They’re hurting him. Leighton has vanished. Everything is spinning, a pinwheel of colours merging into one another and bleeding out red. He sees a desk, but it’s not the one at the base. He starts to remember the police task force when it all goes black.
***
When Truce comes to, he is lying on the floor. His body is mottled with bruises, and he tastes blood in his mouth. His head throbs worse than any hangover he has ever had.
“You’ve read his file,” someone is saying. “You know he had PTSD. His psychiatrist even wrote that a relapse couldn’t be ruled out. The force took him on in all knowledge. You can’t fire him.’ He realises it is We
ndy’s voice. He struggles to sit up. He understands now he has had a fit. He had them before when he was recovering. He looks down. Thank Christ he hasn’t wet himself this time.
Wendy glances over and notices he’s come to. She leans down and helps him to his feet.
Rose is standing inches away. “I think you need to take some personal time, Inspector Truce,” she says, her voice rigid with disapproval.
CHAPTER 10
“I don’t think you should drive yourself,” says Wendy hesitantly. They stand by the Bob’s desk. The desk remains empty, and the black card is lying on the floor where Truce threw it. He realises everything that has happened has barely taken half an hour.
“You think Rose will give you time off to drive me?” asks Truce.
Wendy is leaning against the desk, one arm propped against it, one leg crossed over the other, but he sees she is facing him directly. He is flattered to see he is getting her full attention. Whatever urgent case she is supposed to be working on, she’s forgotten it in her concern for him. Despite his ringing head, he feels a warmth in the pit of his stomach — it’s an unfamiliar feeling of someone caring about him.
She must have been the one telling the others to let go, undoing his collar and tie. Her hair has come partway down. Wispy curls snake down her bare neck. She has discarded her glasses. If he didn’t feel like shit, he would find her damn attractive.
“Are you listening to me?” Wendy moves closer to him. Peers into his face. She’s trying to check his eyes.
He steps back. “I don’t feel on top form, but I’ll take it slow. I can hardly get an ambulance home.”
“I could get Herbert to drive you.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t take him away from his heightened security duties,” says Truce, trying to be upbeat.
Wendy is reluctant, but eventually he gets away. That she doesn’t offer to drive him herself tells him her case must, indeed, be high priority. He hopes his episode hasn’t cost her important time.
Only the Dead Know Page 8