by Lisa Cutts
She removed her hands from her neck, stiff from hours of bending over the table logging the items in front of her.
‘What should I do then?’ she said. ‘Take Mr Rodriguez’s credit card here and go shopping? Grow up.’
‘Fish and chips it is, then,’ said Dane as he opened the door and walked out.
Sophia threw herself down in her chair. She was tired, and although she didn’t like him having the last word, she was too worn out to shout after him.
A text from Harry lit up the screen of her phone, temporarily taking her mind off the frustration of being stuck at headquarters logging stolen goods.
Soph, overtime tomorrow if you’re interested. Let me know, H.
Murder was definitely more interesting than what she was doing. She hesitated only a moment before she replied:
Thanks but can’t really. Dane and I are likely to be here til late and I’m back at 8am. Anything good?
She saw that her DI was typing a response, yet it took a long time for so few words to appear on her phone.
Bit hush hush ATM. H.
Was it her imagination, or was Harry reluctant to share information with her?
Chapter 44
Saturday 9 May
Fortunately for Harry, his girlfriend Hazel didn’t ask too many questions. She clearly trusted him implicitly, not that he’d ever given her any reason to be concerned about his behaviour.
He knew he’d been a bit distant lately, not to mention quiet on their evenings at home together. It was why he thought she wouldn’t probe too much about why he was disappearing off to Sussex on a Saturday morning, when the incident room was on the cusp of arresting someone for Jenny Bloomfield’s murder. Harry had thought long and hard about whether he should go, but he simply couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right about Dane Hoopman. No one else seemed to notice.
He gave Hazel a hug and a kiss on the cheek, told her he’d be back in East Rise incident room within a few hours and drove towards the motorway that would lead him in the direction of Sussex.
*
An hour later, Harry pulled up outside a small detached cottage. At first glance it was a picture of perfection with its country garden on the cusp of blooming, green land stretching out behind, cottage itself like something from the front of a chocolate box.
Only as Harry began to walk towards the house did he see the rotting wooden window frames, the peeling paint on the walls and the guttering full of moss and leaves.
He rang the bell and waited.
The door was flung open by a woman he knew to be in her mid-fifties, although she could have passed for ten years younger. She was five foot ten, of generous build with long dark-brown hair, a hint of grey barely visible.
‘You must be Carrie,’ he said, showing her his warrant card.
‘Please come in,’ she replied, voice matching her height and size.
He stepped inside, marvelling at how modern the interior looked and the amount of work that must have taken place. He ran an appreciate glance over the front room, which stretched the length of the house.
‘Yes, the inside’s finished, it’s just the exterior that’s drained our money and energy levels.’
‘Been here long?’ he said.
‘We bought it several years ago, but it’s only since I retired from the police last year that I’ve had time to do much,’ she said, indicating towards an armchair. ‘It’s been a lot of hard work, as you can imagine. The place was empty when we bought it, hadn’t been lived in for years, so it really was a lot of hard graft.’
‘I love it,’ said Harry with genuine enthusiasm.
‘Anyway,’ Carrie said, ‘I know you didn’t drive all this way to talk about interior design. You were a bit mysterious on the phone about why you wanted to make such a journey to visit me. It was as if you were worried someone was listening to us.’
‘I don’t think anyone was listening to us talk, but it saddens me to say that I don’t feel I can trust anyone at the moment. It’s all too easy to record a phone call only for its contents to fall into the wrong hands.
‘I’ll get to the point: I’m here to ask you about Dane Hoopman.’
The silence that followed allowed Harry the chance to really appreciate the solitude of the Sussex countryside.
‘Dane Hoopman,’ Carrie repeated, pronouncing each syllable as if relishing the sound. ‘He was quite the rising star.’
She let out a long sigh.
‘I was about to put the kettle on, but now I think I’ll make it a beer. Want to join me?’
‘As tempting as it is,’ said Harry, ‘the drive back’s a bit of a problem, especially with my lack of breakfast. I’ll stick to a coffee if you don’t mind.’
‘Dane Hoopman,’ she said again with a shake of her head as she made towards the door. ‘I’ll get the drinks sorted and then I’ll tell you all I remember about my young protégé.’
A couple of minutes later, she was back, bottle of Stella in her hand.
‘Yours won’t be long,’ she said. ‘Sure I can’t tempt you? I’ll even make you a sandwich to soak it up.’
‘It’s kind of you, but no thanks. Getting back to Dane.’
He watched her lift the bottle to her lips and swallow down half of its contents in one mouthful. He waited while she used the sleeve of her sweatshirt to wipe the beer from the corners of her mouth.
‘You can take the girl out of Riverstone,’ she smiled at him. ‘Now you’ve seen my classier side, what exactly is it you want to know about Dane?’
‘You were one of his trainers at Police Training College?’ said Harry.
His question was answered with a nod, followed by another swig of beer.
Harry carried on. ‘Is there anything you can tell me about him? Particularly anything that didn’t sit comfortably with you.’
Carrie peered at him, blue eyes piercing into him. At last she said, ‘It was never anything, you know, definite.’
She pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt down over her wrists until only her fingers clamped around the top of the bottle were visible.
Carrie’s fingers teased the corner of the label from the glass surface.
‘He seemed under the radar,’ she said. ‘And he was always one step ahead of everyone else. I like to think that I was switched on. I’d been a response officer for years, but I was finding the hours and shifts a struggle, so for my final couple of years I went to Training School. I loved it. At least until I had Dane Hoopman in my class. He didn’t seem to work very hard, but he achieved great results in exams, stuff like that. I didn’t like him: he had attitude, but never enough to get him in bother. It was the looks I sometimes saw him give people when he thought no one was watching. Mostly, it was just this feeling I got, you know?’
Harry wasn’t sure that this was getting him anywhere. Carrie jumped from her seat and said, ‘I’ll get your coffee. And another beer.’
From the look on her face when she returned with his coffee and another bottle of Stella for herself, Harry could tell she was stealing herself to reveal something that was clearly playing on her mind.
‘Right then,’ she said when she had settled back, legs tucked under her. ‘There’s little I could tell you of any substance until right at the end of training. Dane seemed to produce good results when it mattered – exams, arrests, getting himself noticed by more senior officers. On our last night out, I watched him in the pub, eyeing up a really lovely young girl called Hannah.’
The second beer looked as though it would have the same life span as the first.
‘I know she’s not in the job any more; I was never sure of the reason why, but it seemed to be kept quiet. Anyway, I saw the way Dane was looking at her that night, and the way another lad in the class, Clive Cavanagh, was also looking at her. I’d noticed over time that Dane had never become particularly friendly with anyone, but especially not the blokes. He didn’t seem to talk to any of them, although he made a point of taking Clive to th
e bar with him and buying him drinks the rest of the night. Dane couldn’t stand him, he used to call him “Numb-nuts”, so it made me suspicious that they were suddenly drinking together.’
She paused, deep in thought.
‘And then there was the accident.’
‘Accident?’ Harry asked, sitting forward, finally feeling like he was on the verge of getting answers.
‘Clive . . . fell . . . in front of a car that night on his way home. Most of the group, including me, had already left, but according to the door staff, Clive was pissed as a fart and had to be helped out.’
Harry had a sinking feeling where this was going.
‘Guess who helped him out of the door?’ she said, smacking her empty bottle down on the coffee table. ‘Dane Hoopman.’
This made Harry move to the edge of his seat to take in what she was saying.
‘There must have been witnesses, CCTV, Clive having some recollection of it?’ said Harry.
Her next words made Harry’s head spin.
‘Clive hit his head on the kerb. He never woke up. It was in a part of town with no CCTV and the driver said it was as if someone launched themselves under his car. A driver going in the other direction said the same thing. Clive didn’t stand a chance.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Harry, a throbbing in his temples taking hold.
‘Clive’s family were convinced that someone must have spiked his drinks in the pub,’ said Carrie, ‘as it was very out of character for him to drink so much. The alcohol in his system was off the chart.
‘We all gave statements about what happened in the pub and everyone denied buying Clive anything other than a few pints of lager. It never sat right with me, not even the bar staff could remember Clive buying a drink. It was packed in there. Three deep at the bar, most of the time. Anyone could have slipped something into his drink.’
‘Christ,’ said Harry. ‘What have I let into my incident room?’
‘The only one who said they’d seen Clive drink vodka that night was Hannah,’ said Carrie, a scowl on her face. ‘A young impressionable woman. If you ask me, she succumbed to Dane’s charms. I expect a lot of the women did. No doubt they still do.’
Carrie’s eyes met Harry’s. ‘I hope there aren’t any women working in your department with Hoopman who fit that criteria.’
Chapter 45
Unlike Sophia’s dreary day at work, Dane’s Saturday rushed by. Before he knew where he was, he was back at his flat getting ready to leave for their date.
He paused in front of the mirror, four of his favourite shirts pristinely ironed and suspended by their coat hangers, dangling off the end of his index fingers. None of them seemed suitable, yet he failed to remember a single time when he hadn’t had a good night wearing any of them.
He threw the clothes on the bed behind him and ran his hands through his hair.
He had very little choice about what he had to do: he couldn’t ignore Turner’s demands, and using the police database to find out information for him was becoming more and more difficult. His last posting had given him access to all sorts of information he could easily divulge, without a finger of suspicion ever being turned on him.
Times were changing in the police, and auditing was severely restricting his unauthorized secondary employment.
Dane sat on the edge of his bed, head in his hands, and knew that there was only ever going to be one way out of this. He couldn’t stay and play at being a detective any longer when he was being forced to break into police headquarters to steal an organized crime group’s ill-gotten gains.
The big question was whether Sophia could – and more importantly would – help him pull it off.
Chapter 46
Grateful that he hadn’t joined Carrie in throwing beer down his neck, Harry made his way back towards East Rise, paying little heed to the speed limit. He had called Hazel to let her know that he was unlikely to be home for several more hours and not to wait up for him.
As he negotiated the roads, he thought about what Carrie had told him, what his own instincts had told him and, more worryingly, what he had suspected was going on in his own incident room between Dane and Sophia.
This called for absolutely no bollocking about. Harry called the head of Anti-Corruption and explained all of his concerns about Hoopman, plus what he knew about Clive Cavanagh’s death.
Half an hour later, when he ended the call, he didn’t feel any better for it. Just more of the same sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
This wasn’t going to end well, and his incident room couldn’t take another beating. Whatever the outcome, he was moving on from East Rise. Even if his hand wasn’t forced, he no longer felt the same about the place any more.
He swore loudly when he saw the traffic queue on the motorway, but with little option than to sit it out, he formulated a plan in his head about what he would like to do with the rest of his life after Major Crime.
Hazel, the absolute love of his life – after his children, of course – was the most important part of his future. If he was thinking of retiring, he should probably run it by her first. Being at home all day might not be part of her plan for the future.
While he thought about it, fingers drumming on the steering wheel as he sat staring at the boot of the car in front, he should probably have a conversation with her about Dane Hoopman. It had crossed his mind, and not for the first time, that Hazel might well have been on Hoopman’s radar if things had been different. Harry didn’t put it past the creep to try it on with her anyway, even though he was certain she would have told him if that had happened.
The realization dawned on him that maybe she wouldn’t have told him, what with him being the DI and in a position to make Hoopman’s career – and life – miserable if he dared make a move.
‘Fucking bastard,’ shouted Harry, drawing some looks from the family of four in the stationary car beside him.
‘Sorry,’ mouthed Harry to the woman in the front passenger seat, who gave him a less than impressed look in return.
Harry ran a hand over the stubble on his chin. Keeping his temper in check was going to be more of a problem than usual, only this time he knew he was going to have to play the long game.
First things first, he would have to get out of this traffic, make sure that his team were making progress with Jenny Bloomfield’s murder, and then get on his way to headquarters at Riverstone to have the first of what would no doubt turn into dozens of meetings of the talking heads.
As long as they actually dealt with Dane Hoopman once and for all, he could live with the hassle. What he couldn’t live with was another complete disaster in his office.
*
Nearly an hour after he was supposed to arrive, Harry screeched to a halt at the front security barrier at HQ. It took him another minute to find his security pass to get in.
He bit his lip as he fumbled in his pockets, his wallet, his warrant card and the side pockets of the car doors. Eventually he found it down the side of the seat. He cursed softly under his breath, aware that the surveillance camera was capturing his every move.
At last he drove in, made his way to the chief officers’ corridor of power and steeled himself for what was undoubtedly going to be a very long evening.
Chapter 47
Evening of Saturday 9 May
Dane and Sophia sat at the bar at The Grand, East Rise’s best, and in fact only, star-rated hotel. There was a smattering of customers: a family, a couple of businesswomen sitting alone banging on the keyboards of laptops, and a few tourists. Dane and Sophia, however, were the only two perched on stools at the black marble bar.
‘I fancy a martini,’ said Dane as he glanced through the drinks list.
‘Very James Bond. Is this the part where you tell me it’s all been a ruse and you’re a spy?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth.’
‘Ah, the “You can’t handle the truth” speech,’ she said with a wry smile on her
lips.
‘I was about to tell you how hot you look in that dress,’ said Dane as he put the drinks list back on the bar. ‘But the barman’s coming now so it’ll have to wait.’
‘Good evening,’ said the barman, Eastern European by his accent, Tamas according to his name badge. ‘What can I get you?’
Dane looked across at Sophia.
‘Martini sounds like a good idea,’ she said. ‘We’ll take two, please.’
Drinks ordered, with a promise from the barman to bring them over if they wanted to sit at a table, they made their way over to a booth in the far corner. The nearest person three tables away was one of the business-women, who was unlikely to notice a bomb go off from the expression on her face and the velocity with which she continually hammered the keyboard.
‘So, what’s your big secret?’ said Sophia, ensconced in her seat, head resting on the high-backed sofa.
‘What makes you think I’ve got a big secret?’ he said, laughter lines showing around his eyes.
‘Hasn’t everyone? And what exactly did you want to speak to me about? Yesterday you made everything sound very mysterious.’
She sat poised, waiting on his explanation. For a brief, horrendous moment, she thought this was the part where he told her he had a wife and kids stashed somewhere, but not to worry because Mrs Hoopman had never understood him, and he knew he’d found his soulmate on that first day, when their eyes met across the front counter at East Rise police station . . .
Dismissing the idea from her mind, she waited, watched the barman as he removed disposable paper coasters from his tray, slid them on the table with a flourish, set down their drinks, added a bowl of cashews and, with a smile, made his way back to the bar.
‘Must be about a fiver’s worth of nuts here,’ Sophia said.
‘Cheers,’ said Dane, holding up his drink.
‘Cheers.’
‘Talking of money,’ said Dane, with a shift in his seat, and what Sophia thought was a reddening to his cheeks. ‘Tonight’s on me.’