[Eddie Collins 01.0] The Third Rule

by Andrew Barrett

  Deacon nodded. And Collins was only 25 per cent of his problem at what, nearly one in the morning. Another quarter of his problem was a drunken reporter called Mick Lyndon and his turncoat rag The Yorkshire Echo. “Get Thomas Gordon out of his pit and down here pronto.” Justine nodded. “And then I want Sirius. I don’t care what he’s doing, get him to call me.”

  “Sir.” Justine was almost back outside Deacon’s office.

  “And, Justine?”

  “Sir?” she said without turning.

  “Would you bring me a cup of tea, and something to eat?”

  “Sir.”

  – Three –

  Mick leaned against a wall in Ros’s home town of Normanton and watched the village closing its eyes for the night. The last of the lights on this quiet road went out and the only movement came from the clouds coming in from the west. The wind had begun without him even noticing and still they sat there in the car, only now, so far as he could see, they weren’t sitting quite as far apart as before.

  Either way, Mick thought as he peered at his watch, at nearly one in the morning, he wished they’d hurry the fuck up because he had lots to do and a deadline to meet. He tapped his foot.

  “They’ll kill you when they find you, Eddie.”

  Eddie breathed the scent of her hair as she rested her chin on his chest. He held her as best he could; clumsily, but with affection. “I know,” was all he could think of saying.

  “I blame him.”

  “Mick?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?”

  “He’s been nothing but trouble for you since you hooked up with him.”

  “Maybe. But now he’s the only one who can get me out of trouble. We have to decode whatever’s in that envelope.”

  “Fingers crossed.”

  “I’ll have the car back by seven at the latest. Promise.”

  “Don’t promise. Just try. If not, ring me so I can get a taxi; I can’t be late for work, I have arguments to start.” Ros opened her door and climbed out. She split her house keys off the keyring and tossed the ignition key back to him. “Please be careful.” She walked away without looking back.

  Eddie climbed into the driver’s seat, moved it back on its runners and watched Ros close the front door.

  Mick took his place beside him. “Come on, mate.”

  – Four –

  Ros turned the bedroom light off and walked to the window, peeled back the curtains and watched her car drive away into the darkness.

  There was a kind of permanence to it that petrified her yet comforted her. The feeling said she would see neither her car nor the man driving it again. They had him cornered. They had him on trumped up charges and he was as good as dead. And that was the trouble; if this had happened a year ago, she would call her boss, she would call friends in CID, correct the error, adjust the mistake, and allow Eddie to put across his point of view.

  Now things were very different. This had become a scary world to live in. If they made an error, the chances of them correcting it were minute because it was easier to have a man killed by the Home Office and score a hit with the public than it was to back down and remove his details from the vidiscreens.

  And the Home Office wouldn’t acknowledge an error anyway. The Rules were king; they were infallible. One might think that they would go all out to make sure they were infallible, to guarantee the public’s faith in them.

  Bollocks.

  Any system was only as good as the people running it. And the people running this system were blind and they were greedy.

  Ros lay awake, staring at the ceiling and wondered how they could get away with making such fundamental errors. Well she wouldn’t allow it.

  –Five –

  “Where you taking me?”

  “I like my privacy.”

  “Privacy is good, but this is delving into recluse territory.”

  Mick laughed, and pointed at something in the distance, half way up a hillside and surrounded by a black smudge of trees. “That’s the farmer who owns my place. He gets a hundred and fifty a week, I get total peace and quiet – everyone’s happy.”

  “This isn’t the address on the envelope.”

  “Ah, you spotted that, you sharp-eyed bastard. That’s my mother’s place; I need a mailing address, but not here. Only me, the farmer, and now you know about this place.”

  Ros’s Renault bounced up the rutted track and Eddie pulled the handbrake on alongside a break in the bushes, killed the engine and listened to the sound of total silence with wonderful clarity. “You’d never know it was here unless you knew it was here,” he laughed.

  “It’s as well hidden as you can get without it being a cave.” Mick ducked beneath low branches and Eddie followed him, but still couldn’t see where they were going, such was the acute darkness and the surreal camouflage enjoyed by this place. Mick had told him it was a two-storey cottage covered entirely by creepers, with a small front and back garden entirely overgrown and surrounded by woodland.

  Mick closed the door after them (it was missing a letterbox, Eddie noticed), and then opened another into the lounge. He flicked on a light and Eddie squinted.

  “For such a slob, you got a nice place.” Eddie looked around. The uneven floor was carpeted, and upon it stood a two-seater cloth couch, a small but modern TV on a glass stand, a bureau and some bookshelves. Tucked away in a corner was a healthily stocked drinks cabinet. And that was all. “You know what.” Eddie stared at the drinks cabinet and the wonderful array of whiskies and vodkas on offer.

  “What?”

  “For the first time in months–”

  “You don’t want a drink?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Me neither. I just want to get this sewn up. If I get pissed now, I am going to die, absolutely no doubt about it.”

  “Live first, drink yourself to death later?”

  “In one, mate. Through there is the kitchen: white coffee, no sugar. I’m going to make a start. I’ll be upstairs.”

  – Six –

  As the first tinges of light tickled the eastern sky, Jeffery had a rough handle on the scene.

  They had erected three tents. There was a normal tent over the grassed area, where they found a shiny 9mm Federal shell casing.

  The second and third tents were lean-to affairs designed to protect doorways and windows from the elements, one over a wide-open window into the hallway of the house, a possible entry point for the offenders, and the second over the French door that gave straight out onto the driveway and gardens from the bedroom.

  Jeffery had assigned jobs to his two CSIs. Linda Wilkinson was on her knees right now, carefully digging away the grass on the banking searching for the bullet, which had probably, barring deflections, penetrated to a depth of just over a metre – she would be there for some time, sifting each shovelful, looking for something dull and grey about the size of a pea.

  Initially, they had found what could have been the entry hole, carefully trimmed the grass from around it with a pair of scissors to get a better look, to judge more carefully if they were even in the right area. And then, using a trajectory rod, they were able to determine that yes, this was a straight and parallel hole directly into the earth that seemed to stop, or veer off to the side, about 100cm down. Linda had carefully photographed the X, Y, and Z axes of the rod, and had been able to determine that the firer had indeed fired directly into the grass banking. Luckily for Wiseman.

  Jessica Mulberry, the CSI dragged across from Bradford to help out, had conducted photography from the conservatory right up to the grass banking, and onwards to the fence where some old rubber mats lay across the topmost wire. A fringe of weeds and a congregation of dead flora on both sides of the fence had prevented them getting any kind of useable footwear evidence – the ground beneath the plants had yielded nothing more than indentations, two pairs on either side of the fence.

  And the mats looked like abused mats from any junk car: a coating o
f cigarette ash covered most of the surface. They had worn smooth in their centres, but not smooth enough to proffer any visible ridge detail. Jessica had labelled and collected them, packaging them carefully for the chemical treatment labs later that day. She had concluded the examination of the fence site by photographing the now naked fence, and by taping for fibres along the top of the fence to a yard either side of where the mats had rested.

  The operational support unit would search the woodland during daylight hours. Jeffery guessed that Jessica had moved on to the next point of his instructions to her. She was to take samples of glass from the smashed conservatory windows, hoping to link fragments of that glass with any found later in the offender’s clothing, all adding to the proof that he was there when the glass exploded. On its own perhaps, it would not be conclusive proof, since glass in any modern frame is not unique, but it would add weight to the prosecution.

  And after she had done that, Jessica was to fingerprint the open window at the end of the long hallway.

  Jeffery stood at the opposite end of that hallway, just outside the kitchen. He was dressed in full scene suit and overshoes, DNA mask and hair net, Nikon dangling on a strap around his somewhat slumped shoulders, hands on hips, looking and thinking; the trait of a good examiner. The hallway was carpeted, so of no use for footwear impressions, but he made a mental note to have a control sample of it removed for any future comparison.

  Behind him, in the kitchen, a trail of metal stepping plates led to where he now stood. The kitchen floor was smooth oak and would yield good footwear impressions. For now, he stood on the hall carpet, having photographed the entry to the house from the front door, into and out of the kitchen, and lounge, and now he found himself in the hallway, wondering at the course of events that had brought the whole team here.

  He swivelled left, facing the open bedroom door.

  Using the tip of a double-gloved finger, he pushed the door right at the very top, near the edge, until it opened another ten inches and then came to a halt. Jeffery sidled into the room, feeling the draught from the open French door cooling the sweat on his face. It brought with it the odour of urine from the dead body slumped half inside a wardrobe on the other side of the door. He entered the room fully, stopped after a couple of yards and turned to face the dead body of Henry Deacon.

  Henry’s face looked bloated, dark in the creases of his skin and pale on the cheeks and forehead. Blood and mucus had escaped his nostrils and made a trail down towards his mouth; another similar trail headed for his ear straight across the cheek. A sheer opaqueness covered his half-open eyes and killed the sparkle, the crystal quality of a living eye, turning it from a pathway into the soul into a barrier of utter emptiness.

  That wasn’t the first thing Jeffery noticed. Henry’s semi-nakedness was; the trousers and underwear abandoned further into the bedroom. And this image was closely linked to the next feature – that of the belt around his neck, puckering up the skin there like the drawstring on a bag.

  On the face of it, just another autoerotic death.

  But, this was different for many reasons.

  The resting place of his body now certainly wasn’t the position in which he died. Lividity, the settling of blood in the body’s lowest points, yet not at the point of contact with the ground or with the wardrobe – where the blood cannot squeeze into – meant Henry had moved after his death and during the early stages of lividity. The change of direction of the blood and mucus on Henry’s face confirmed it. An amazing feat for a dead man.

  Jeffery reached into the camera bag and pulled out an infrared thermometer, and took readings from several non-reflective surfaces in the room: the carpet, the curtains, the bed. They all reported an ambient temperature of 14°C. Then he turned the thermometer onto Henry, in the abdomen, then the head. A healthy body operates around 37°C, and after death, in non-extreme surroundings, it will lose a degree or so per hour until it reaches the ambient temperature where it will then stabilise. The abdomen read 30°C, the head 29 – but that was to be expected because of the head’s larger surface area.

  He took hold of Henry’s left arm and tried to move it. He couldn’t; it was as though the entire body was made up of one piece of wax. “Rigor.”

  The magazines around Henry’s body appeared to have been placed there after death, rather than while Henry was alive and still enjoying them. And also curious was how new they all were. Not a crease or a tear anywhere on the glossy covers.

  He used a little aluminium powder and a new squirrel-hair brush, and immediately fingermarks became visible on the cover of the first magazine he examined. And that was good, until the next stroke of his brush, when a leather glove mark appeared, complete with seam stitching. Same on the next magazine, and the next; also more glove marks on the pages that were open. Jeffery looked at Henry, and Henry’s hands were bare.

  69

  Friday 26th June

  – One –

  Eddie carried two mugs of coffee into the room, where he found Mick sitting in an old green leather and wooden office chair before a large desk that ran the length of the window wall. On the walls were clippings from Mick’s published stories, pictures of news events before he became an old hack. And there were even silver-framed awards from newspapers and press agencies, handshakes at gala events, black-tie awards and prestigious dinners.

  Mick knew his stuff, and had been around long enough to know when he was on the verge of something big. Only this something big was razor-edged: one side would kill them both, and the other would see the collapse of a high-ranking British minister and all the laws he supported.

  Mick had changed out of his sweaty and grimy shirt, and had replaced it with a red checked shirt over a T-shirt, and a pair of light blue jeans.

  “You look like James Dean.” Eddie set the coffee on the desk next to a computer screen that showed nothing more grand than a crossword puzzle.

  Mick moved the mouse, concentrating on the screen. “You look like a prick,” he said absently.

  “Thanks.”

  “Welcome.”

  “That the thing you showed me in the flat?”

  “Yeah, this is what was in the envelope. I scanned it in, but it’s just a puzzle, a box full of letters.”

  >

  “So what’re we supposed to do with it?”

  “And this,” Mick clicked his mouse, “was in the time-delay email that Henry sent me.”

  “Oh good,” Eddie said, confused. “I guess there’s a message in there somewhere.”

  “You’d think so, but I’m at a loss as to where it’s supposed to be.”

  “Can you overlay one on top of the other?”

  It took Mick twenty-five minutes and used most of his vocabulary of swear words, but eventually he managed it.

  “IDAE,” Eddie said. “What the hell’s that? Or backwards, “EADI.”

  “No, no, I get it now, I get it.” Mick pulled his chair forward, and Eddie leaned in over his shoulder. “Take just the letters in the blacked-out bits.” He reached for a pen, snatched an envelope and began writing. “Read them out to me; left to right, top to bottom.”

  When they’d finished, they had a string of letters that initially made no sense at all. “You can see why he went to such lengths, it still makes–”

  “Wait. It does, look.” Mick picked out the words from the string of letters, split them using a slash and suddenly it did made sense, suddenly it made perfect sense.

  Great/preston/Prince/Edward/road/Nob/Shite/Off/Mud/track/lookout/tower/stick

  “Well, it more or less makes sense. Great Preston, half an hour away. Prince Edward Road, that’s…”

  “…no problem,” Mick said, trying to read the map by the car’s interior light.

  “We on Prince Edward Road now?”

  “Have been for half a mile or so.”

  “So what the hell’s Nob Shite Off?”

  “I was hoping we’d just come across it.”

  But they didn’t. T
hey went as far as the next T-junction but hadn’t seen anything referring to Nob Shite. “Okay, let’s turn around and do it from this end.”

  It was twenty past one in the morning. Both had rumbling stomachs, both had a healthy growth of stubble and both were looking for something neither had any real hope of achieving: freedom from something they’d been sucked into, unlikely ever to be spat out of again.

  By half past one, the headlamps picked out the first drizzle of what promised to be a heavy rainfall, the glossy road shining back at them in between encroaching hedgerows and treacherous bends. Eddie slowed right down, finding his way cautiously. When Mick shouted, “There!” Eddie hit the brakes, locked the car up and the back end swung around and collided with the hedge.

  “Bollocks!” Eddie climbed out and slammed the door in frustration. He went to inspect the damage and Mick went to inspect the road sign.

  “I found it, we’re here.”

  Eddie stood upright. “Where the hell’s ‘here’?” He looked along the headlamp’s beam and saw nothing but green hedgerows and a thin strip of slippery asphalt.

  “Nob Shite Off.” Mick pointed to a faded rusty sign slowly being swallowed by the bushes. All he could actually see was OFF, but when he followed the hedge line there was a slight gap and several broken branches and twigs on the ground. “Here.” He approached the gap and could see the ever-decreasing arch of foliage that had tried to keep Henry Deacon’s secret a secret.

  “Jesus,” Eddie said as he joined him, “we’ll never get the car up there.”

  “Have to, can’t leave it here. Either someone will slam into it, or if we’re being followed…”

  “Okay, come on.”

  Eddie swung the car round, thankful there was no apparent damage, and aimed for the centre of the archway. The car slipped into a claustrophobically dark tunnel, and branches, some freshly snapped, scratched down the sides of the car and long grass pulled at the underside as he gently edged forward.