The Cambroni Vendetta

by David George Clarke

  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.

  Her body!

  Christ! No!

  Throwing the bathrobe behind him, he stepped forward, mindful not to tread in the blood, his police training for procedure at crime scenes automatically kicking in.

  One look at Emma’s face confirmed his thoughts, but he still felt her neck for a pulse. There was nothing. She was dead.

  But how? What had happened? How come he hadn’t heard anything?

  He looked again at her face and saw the large wound to her nose. It was split and a bruise had spread under her eyes. That meant something, but he couldn’t remember what.

  What the fuck was he going to do! This couldn’t be happening; it had to be a dream.

  He clasped his hands together as he fought the involuntary shaking that had taken over his body. She was dead. In his house. After a night of sex.

  His heart was beating so rapidly, he could hear the blood pounding through his ears. At the same time he was gulping air, almost hyperventilating in fear.

  One of Emma’s arms was stretched out in his direction, her fingers seeming to point at him, begging for help. He took her hand. It was cold and stiff. He tried to bend her arm but it resisted. Had rigor mortis already set in? He tried to move it again and found he was tilting the body by simply lifting her hand, her arm acting as a lever. He let go of the arm. From the little about pathology he knew, he was sure the stiffness meant she’d been dead for several hours.

  What time was it now? The alarm had gone at six; it couldn’t be more than six thirty. She must have gone out to the loo and fallen. How long ago? What time had they finally flopped to an exhausted halt in bed and collapsed into sleep? It must have been at least one.

  None of that mattered. What mattered was what the hell was he going to do? He had the naked body of a woman in his bathroom, a woman he’d shared his bed with who was now dead. He had no idea who she was; she was just someone who … Bugger! Her car was outside. This might be a rural back road these days, but there was always traffic going past in the daytime, people from Rappington heading for the M1. It was the quickest route for them; they would see the red Golf. Maybe someone who knew him, or worse, knew Mo, would see it and tell her. That couldn’t happen; he had to get rid of the car.

  But what about the body? Think, Brooke, think!

  He couldn’t report the accident for the simple reason that his wife would get to hear about it. He was a police officer, for Christ’s sake, it would be the end of his career as well as the end of his marriage.

  As he stared in anger at Trisha’s body, anger at the predicament she’d dumped him in, the implications of the injuries to her face hit him. She had what looked like a broken nose. Some clever lawyer, or even his bosses, might think they’d had a fight, that he’d smashed her in the face, broken her nose, knocked her down and beaten her head against the shower tray. That would be murder and difficult to talk his way out of. His DNA would be all over her. It would be his word against theirs, since Emma couldn’t support his tale, couldn’t tell them that he’d slept through the whole thing.

  Panicking now about what he was going to do, he jumped to his feet and ran into the bedroom. What the hell was the time? 6:40. Right. Then he remembered. The new guv. What was her name? Yes, Trisha McVie. The new guv was arriving at the SCF that morning for a nine o’clock meeting. Didn’t Emma say she had a nine o’clock? In The Park? That wasn’t going to happen, but his meeting was, and he had to be there.

  Thank God Mo was away. No, thank no one. If she hadn’t been away, this wouldn’t have happened.

  Priorities, man, priorities. Think like a cop.

  OK, number one, the body wasn’t going anywhere. If he turned off the heating in the bathroom, the decay would slow down. Mustn’t open the window though, the flies would be in. No one was coming into the house. Mercifully he had put his foot down with Mo about a cleaning lady. They couldn’t afford it, he said. He knew they could, but it would cramp his style. So the body wasn’t a priority, but the car was. Right, number two, the car. What was he going to do with it?

  He looked up as he heard a car go by. It still wasn’t fully daylight, and with the remnants of the storm still filling the sky, it was darker than normal. He had to drive the car somewhere, dump it and return to the cottage. How would he do that? Walk? Run? His bike! The car was a Golf, a hatchback. If he folded the rear seats down he could just about get his bike in the back. After dumping the car, he could cycle home.

  But he couldn’t just dump it on the road; it would be found and maybe someone would link its description to one they had seen outside his cottage.

  Then he remembered the factory.

  One of the first cases Gus Brooke had been involved in on moving to the SCF had been staking out a derelict industrial premises on the Nottingham side of Rappington. Located half a mile off the old Rappington road on a lane that went nowhere, the site had originally been an ambitious factory project built in the 1960s for small manufacturing businesses to pool resources they could otherwise not afford, a project that failed spectacularly at the first hint of a recession. The buildings and plot were sold to a repackaging business that used it until the mid-90s when alternative technology in more convenient locations forced its closure. Now largely derelict, for the past twenty-five years, the site had been left to decay, ignored by its owners as an inconvenience they would rather forget. However, the original name of the project, ‘the factory’, was still just visible in faded all-lower-case lettering over the main entrance, and the name had stuck.

  During the past year, there had been rumours of the factory being used as a drug den, or possibly as a lab for drug manufacture, while other rumours had squatters or vagrants living there. There had even been talk of it being used as a location for making porn movies.

  The SCF had staked it out for several weeks, monitoring all vehicles along the Rappington road, taking numbers, looking for frequent visits of people who had no right being there. They had also scoured the place for signs of any activity, but ultimately they found nothing. Eventually, other cases had come up, more important ones and the budget for the surveillance was pulled.

  But the outcome was that Gus knew the factory well, knew that the main gateway appeared to be locked up with padlocks and secure fencing, but wasn’t. It was a façade. It was easy to pull the gates open, if you knew how, easy to drive in
and disappear into a central yard that was hidden from the road. Even better, the rear of the factory site bordered one of the nearby network of irrigation channels, one with a path running alongside it, and he knew of a well-disguised break in the fence where he could get through with his bike.

  He checked the time again. 6:50. Working backwards, the meeting at the SCF was at nine; it took him twenty-five minutes from cottage to office; so he should aim to be leaving by 8:30 tops, earlier if possible to allow for any snarl-ups in the traffic.

  It would take no more than ten minutes to get to the factory and dump the car. He could take a couple of the pathway routes to cycle home, perhaps being spotted by other fitness regulars who would support his story, should he need it, that he was out doing nothing unusual on the day that Emma Carrington disappeared.

  He just about had time to do it if he left in the next fifteen minutes.

  Where were her car keys? Jacket. They were probably there. He’d take the jacket and shoes and dump them with the car. What about the overnight bag? Surely it would be better to dump it in the car just in case the car was found. The assumption would be made that she’d been abducted with her car, driven to the factory, and taken somewhere else. Yes, better to lose the bag with the car.

  A cold realisation hit him. Suppose, just for a second, that for some reason he came under suspicion. Ridiculous. Why should he? But suppose. What had he touched? The bag when he peered inside it. He’d wipe around it, the jacket and shoes, too. From now on he’d wear disposable gloves. What about the car? He needed to wipe around the boot area along with the tools and wheel nuts. What else? He couldn’t remember touching anything else and he didn’t have much time.

  Snapping into gear, Gus pulled open his wardrobe, grabbed his cycling kit and ran downstairs. After dropping the kit in the kitchen, he ran out to his car where he kept a bag of scene-of-crime coveralls, gloves and overshoes in the boot. He was going to have to put them all on to drive the Golf and trust his luck that he wasn’t seen. He picked up the scene bag, returned indoors and quickly dressed in the cycling kit followed by the scene gear. Looking now as if he were ready to attend a crime scene, he hurried back to the Golf and lowered the rear seats. But before fetching his bike from the garage, he lifted the boot floor covering and wiped the damaged wheel, the jack and the brace. After putting the cover back in place, he wiped its handle. Worried about grease and oil from his bike, he fetched a large bin bag from the kitchen which he spread over the Golf’s rear floor. It didn’t cover it completely, but it would have to do. The bike stowed, he bent to wipe the nuts of the nearside rear wheel. It was overkill, he knew, given the heavy rain that had continued to wash them, but little details were important. Finally, he made one more trip into the house for Emma’s overnight bag along with her jacket and shoes. As he picked up the bag, something nagged at him. Had Emma had a handbag? And where was her washbag? Bathroom. He ran there, eyes searching. Got it. She appeared to have put all her cosmetic stuff back in it, and anyway, if he found something else later, he’d dump it. He carefully unzipped the overnight bag and put the washbag back in place, spotting the top of a handbag as he did. Emma must have stuffed it in there. But something was still nagging at him. Something that might spoil his plans. What was it? Something that might prevent … of course! The factory gates. He hadn’t been back there since the operation finished. What if the owners had finally followed the police advice and fitted a proper padlock? That would certainly screw him.

  He ran back into the garage to fetch a pair of bolt croppers and added them to a backpack he’d stowed in the rear of the Golf to carry the scene-of-crime coveralls when he cycled back home after dumping the car. Slamming the tailgate shut, he exhaled in relief. Bases all covered.

  Keeping a wary eye out for traffic, he was grateful for once that Rappington was a backwater with little going on and with most of its houses set back off the road. He couldn’t believe his luck when he reached the turnoff to the factory site without seeing another vehicle.

  In the end, since there was still no padlock securing the chain on the gate, the bolt croppers weren’t needed. He was quickly inside the site with the gates closed behind him. He drove the Golf into the centre of the yard where the ground was concrete with little surface debris. He didn’t want to leave a trail even though his sports shoes were covered with booties. He was relieved to see that in spite of the overall poor condition of the buildings, the drainage in the open yard was good and the previous night’s weather hadn’t created any problems.

  It was at this point he noticed the mobile phone sitting in the cup holder on the dashboard. He froze. It must be Emma’s; why hadn’t he seen it before? A sick, sinking feeling of impotence threatened to overwhelm him. The phone would be happily sending messages back to the service provider announcing where it was and where it had been. This was, after all, the age of Big Brother. Even smashing the phone now or taking it somewhere else wouldn’t affect that record. It would tell whoever investigated Emma’s disappearance that it had been outside his house the entire night. This damn little device would be his nemesis and there was nothing he could do about it. In fact, what he was doing now, hiding the car and thinking about how he might dump Emma’s body was only making things worse in the light of the story the phone would tell. Shit.

  He reached for the phone and pressed the home button. Nothing. He pressed it again. Still nothing. A glimmer of hope lit up in his mind. The phone was either turned off or it had run out of juice. He had to know which it was since if it was flat he could still be in trouble, depending on when that happened, but if Emma had switched it off, the chances were she did it before the puncture. Why would she do that? Maybe worried about calls distracting her when she was concentrating hard on driving in the storm.

  He dug around in the various receptacles in and under the dashboard, looking for a paperclip or something similar with which he could release the phone’s SIM tray, but he found nothing of any use. Dammit, he kept the one that had come with his phone on his normal key ring along with his car and house keys, but he had left that key ring back at the cottage, grabbing only a single key for the kitchen door from a hook as he left. He checked Trisha’s key ring, but again, there was nothing.

  “She must have something I can use, for Christ’s sake,” he whined in frustration.

  His eyes made a frantic scan of the dashboard. The glove compartment! He pressed the button on the front and the compartment burst open to reveal a jumble of maps, manuals and a plastic document pouch stuffed to the brim with papers. And yes! Several were stapled together.

  Tearing at the corner of one sheaf of insurance bumph, he removed a staple, straightened it out and pushed it into the tiny hole in the side of the phone. After removing the SIM card, he closed the tray and took a deep breath. “Please,” he begged as he pressed the button on the phone’s top edge to switch it on. After two heart-stopping seconds, the screen lit up as the phone went through its boot routines, the battery condition quickly showing in the top right corner. When it registered eighty-six per cent, Gus knew he was OK. It had been switched off which meant that when the phone was near the cottage, no information was being transmitted.

  “Magic,” he muttered through clenched teeth, his faith in his luck restored. He slipped both the SIM card and phone in his coverall pocket. “You two are going straight in the nearest stream.”

  The phone crisis over, Gus removed his bike from the Golf, put the seats back in place and stowed the bin bag in his backpack. He threw Emma’s jacket onto the front passenger seat, shoes in the footwell and the overnight bag in the boot. The keys he left in the ignition. If some chancer came along and stole the car, all the better. They’d have some explaining to do if they were caught.

  He picked up the bike, not wanting to leave any tyre tread marks, and carried it to the spot on the site perimeter where he could pull the fence apart. Within ten minutes of arriving at the factory, he was cycling along the pathway rather faster than normal and al
though feeling dreadfully hung over, he was relieved to have completed the first part of the cleanup.

  Arriving back at the cottage at 7:45 gave Gus time for a much-needed shower in one of the spare bathrooms. By ten minutes past eight he was in his car, trying to put thoughts of how he was going to deal with the dead body in his bathroom out of his head as he drove into Nottingham to meet Detective Superintendent Trisha McVie.

  Part Five

  Gus Brooke

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Gus Brooke was the last of the SCF team of detectives to arrive in the main operations office, the rest having left nothing to chance on their new boss’s unofficial first morning. Even though Trisha McVie’s introduction wasn’t scheduled until nine, no one wanted to be caught out by an unexpected early arrival.

  Jennifer followed Gus with her eyes as he laboured his way across the room to his desk. She was surprised: he looked dreadful, as if he’d had no sleep, and he was making eye contact with no one. She continued to watch him as he switched on his computer, but after keying in his password, he simply stared at the monitor, his eyes not moving.

  Trying to think positively, rather than assume he’d had a late, boozy night, she thought maybe he was sickening for something and had made an effort to come in, not wanting to make a bad impression.

  She caught Derek’s eye and nodded towards Gus. Derek glanced in his direction and turned immediately back to Jennifer, pulling a face. Jennifer frowned at him, signalling with an insistent nod to talk to Gus.

  Raising his eyebrows to heaven, Derek turned.

  “Morning Gus. Are yer right, mate?”

  For a moment, Gus appeared not to have heard him, but then he nodded, his eyes still fixed on his screen. “Fine.”