Under Parr

by Andrea Bramhall

  “Well, it was that or go into the army.”

  “Piss off.”

  “No, I’m serious. In my family, it’s tradition. You either go into the police or the army. I didn’t fancy crawling around in the mud so I thought the police was my best option.”

  “So why did you follow the tradition then? Why not follow your heart?”

  “I guess, I’ve done both really. I always, and I really do mean always, knew that I’d end up following my dad.”

  “Don’t tell me your dad’s Commissioner Collier.”

  “Okay, then I won’t tell you.”

  Bollocks. She slowed as she approached the speed change into Burnham Market. “Is that your plan? To follow him all the way to the top?”

  He shrugged. “Well, yeah. He’s always on at us about how the next generation has to do better than the previous one. So, yeah, I guess to make sure I don’t let him down, I have to be a better police officer than he is.”

  Kate whistled. “Good luck with that, then.”

  “Yeah. I know I’ve got a lot to learn about being a good police officer, but it’s about people too, right? About getting on to get up.”

  Kate chuckled, thinking about his oil-and-water relationship with Tom Brothers.

  “What?”

  “You’re right that a lot of it is who you know, not what, and all that crap, and if that’s the way you want to go, then I think you’ve got some work to do there too.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She glanced at him. He looked totally confused.

  “Well, you don’t exactly get along with everyone.” She shrugged. “I mean, take you and Tom, for example. You have different opinions, which is fine, but you two can’t get along for more than a minute. If you’re looking to make friends to help you move through the ranks, you’re going to have to learn to politick. To get on, or appear to get on, with everyone. You’ll need to learn to keep your opinions to yourself and swallow ones that you disagree with. If you don’t, you won’t get anywhere.”

  “He thinks I’m gay. That’s why he doesn’t like me.”

  She thought back to the conversations she’d had with Tom. She didn’t think he was in any way homophobic. Certainly she hadn’t seen any indication of it. But she was aware that men often saw lesbians and gay men differently. Lesbians were often a source of fascination to them, while gay men were a threat to their masculinity. Or some such bollocks. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why does he think you’re gay?”

  “Because I don’t have a girlfriend and I take care of myself.”

  “Not exactly an exhaustive criteria.”

  “No.”

  “Are you?”

  “What?”

  “Gay. It’s okay if you are. You can talk to me about it.”

  “I don’t need to talk about it. I’m not gay.”

  Kate held up one hand in surrender. “Okay.” She dropped it back to the wheel. “As long as you know you can talk to me about anything. Whenever. No judgement.”

  He turned to face her, eyes blazing. “I’m not fucking gay. All right. I can have any woman I want, whenever I fucking want. All I’ve got to do is ask them. I mean, look at me.” He indicated his hands up and down. “There’d have to be something wrong with a woman not to want this.”

  Kate raised her eyebrow. “No offence intended, right?”

  He frowned.

  “See that’s what I mean about needing to learn to politick, Gareth. You just said there was something wrong with any woman who doesn’t want to sleep with you.”

  His frown deepened.

  “You’ve just insulted every lesbian, every married and faithful woman, women who are older than you and not into younger men for whatever reason, hell, you even insulted nuns. Just because they won’t find you attractive. Not very smart. I’m your superior officer, an older woman, compared to you anyway, and a lesbian. Do you think I’d feel very favourably right now to helping you further your career?”

  He swallowed but continued to stare belligerently at her. “No.”

  “Do you see my point now?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I see a lot of things now.” He forced a smile. “Thanks, sarge.”

  Kate frowned but decided to leave him alone to stew in his own bitterness for a while. Either he’d take her words to heart and learn from them, or he’d carry on being his mercurial self, getting nowhere fast and blaming everyone else for his misfortune. Either way, she didn’t care. She had bigger things to worry about right now than Gareth Collier’s ego.

  CHAPTER 19

  Kate tapped her pen against her notepad and stared at the wall. The picture of Alan’s facial reconstruction was taped next to the picture of his skeleton, with notes of what they knew written all around the board. Date of birth: third of August 1940. Head groundsman at West Norfolk Royal Golf Course until retirement.

  The details of the scraps of clothes and dentures were underneath his picture, including the names those items bore and their dates of death. Annie Balding, 5.12.13. Edward Bale, 10.10.13. Dorothy Kinder, 23.06.14. Rose Harvey, 19.02.14. John Wood, 3.04.14. At the centre of the board Brancombe House was circled. The number 3840 sat in its own bubble, a line connecting the two, and a big question mark underneath it.

  “Do we have Alan Parr’s address? Where he lived before he went into the nursing home?” Kate asked into the quiet room. She wasn’t asking anyone in particular, just hoping that one of her colleagues had managed to trace the information.

  “Yup.” Tom said. “Docking lad. Not far from your house actually. 2 North Farm Cottages.”

  She frowned. “That’s literally across the road from me.”

  “Like I said, not far. It was sold in 2010 to the current owners, a Mr and Mrs Pastor. The proceeds of the sale funded his time in Brancombe House until June 2013.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Based on what he sold it for and the cost of the fees, that’s how long it would have lasted before it was all gone. Bloody criminal if you ask me. A man works all his life, pays his bloody taxes, and takes nothing back. Works hard to buy himself a home, make himself comfortable, and the bloody government takes every penny of it from him when he needs looking after.”

  “Well,” Gareth started, “some people would say that the reason we work hard and build a nest egg is to give ourselves the funds to look after ourselves when we need the help.”

  Kate couldn’t make up her mind if Gareth was taking the opposite position to Tom just to wind him up or if he truly believed what he was saying.

  “Just because we’re a welfare state doesn’t mean we have to depend on the government for everything. If we can afford to pay to help ourselves, why shouldn’t we? After all, if those who can afford to pay do, then there’s more left in the coffers so that those who can’t afford to pay aren’t left to rot.” He shrugged. “Isn’t that the core value of the welfare state? To provide help for those who can’t help themselves?”

  Tom glared at him. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t grate on you that your taxes, the money you pay to the government from your own wage, goes to pay dole money for the very criminals we are looking to take off the streets in the vast majority of cases we work on?” He folded his arms across his chest. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t piss you off.”

  “That isn’t what I said.” He folded his own arms and mirrored Tom’s pose. “It doesn’t actually matter how I feel about it. It’s the society we live in, and it is all perfectly legal. The government we voted into power made it so.”

  “Fine, then, pedant. It should be bloody criminal,” Tom growled. “Better?”

  Gareth smiled sweetly, but wisely held his tongue.

  Definitely trying to wind him up. Why?

  “Okay, so moving on from the highwaymen that are in government,” Stella said, “where are we up to with the rest of this investigation?”

  Kate sighed. “We’ve got a case of embezzlement that I swear is based o
n our victim’s death, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how someone could’ve killed him and dumped the body in the bunker on that night.”

  “So you think someone murdered him to claim the money from the government?” Stella clarified.

  “It’s the only thing that kind of makes sense given the facts we have.”

  Stella nodded and scribbled in the bible. “What about Dr Anderson? Have we heard anything from her?”

  “Not yet,” Gareth said.

  “And have we heard from Grimshaw about the data from Sister Lodge?”

  “Nope,” Kate supplied.

  “Right.” Stella picked up the phone and punched numbers. “Len, it’s Stella. I’m good thanks, you? Glad to hear it. Listen, how’s your man getting on with that flash drive from the nursing home?” She paused to listen. “He is? That’s great. We’ll get a projector set up for him. When shall we expect him?” She frowned. “That long. How come?” She glanced at Kate. “No problem, Len. Kate needs to go and see Dr Anderson anyway. She and Collier will gladly give him a lift over here on the way back.”

  Kate nodded, hoisted herself out of her chair and grabbed her coat.

  “Say an hour or so. That should give them time to get there and talk to Dr Anderson. Right, thanks, Len.”

  “Tell me he wasn’t going to get the bus,” Kate said, imagining how much equipment the young tech would likely be humping around.

  “It was either that or wait for one of Len’s field techs to get back, and he didn’t know how long that would be. They’re processing a scene at the moment.”

  Kate shook her head. “Right, we’ll be off then. Play nice while I’m gone, kiddies.” She waved her fingers behind her as she and Gareth skulked out of the door.

  “You see?” she heard Tom saying as the door swung shut behind them. “You see what I have to put up with from him?”

  The bang of the door cut off the rest of what she was sure would be a tirade of vitriol against Gareth Collier.

  She waited until they were both in the car, belted in, and she was pulling on to the A149 towards King’s Lynn before asking, “Do you enjoy winding him up or is there another reason for it?”

  Gareth bristled and turned to look out of the window.

  Kate waited.

  “He thinks he’s the dog’s bollocks and it annoys me. He talks a load of shit most of the time, and cocky arses like that, well, they just need taking down a peg or two sometimes.”

  Wow. Talk about pot calling the kettle black. Kate snorted a quick laugh. “You do realise that he says exactly the same thing about you, don’t you?”

  “I’m not cocky, and I don’t talk a load of shit.”

  “Ah, my friend,” she said, “we all talk a load of shit sometimes.” She slowed down at the roundabout, indicated left, and then crossed the junction. “Can I make a suggestion?”

  She phrased it as a question, but as his senior officer they both knew it wasn’t really a suggestion. It was a polite order.

  “What?”

  “Next time you want to take him down a peg or two, as you put it, I want you to smile at him, and say you think he’s wrong, but agree to disagree with him.”

  He scowled at her.

  “He is an experienced officer who has a lot he can teach you. If you’re willing to learn. I don’t care if you’re best mates or you hate each other. It shouldn’t affect us one way or the other. But you’ve made it a problem, you’ve let it affect you. That’s why I’m sitting in the car with you today rather than Tom. I want to work with professionals. Professionals don’t let a personality clash affect how they perform in their jobs.” She turned on her windscreen wipers as the rain started to fall, distorting her view of the road. “Do I make myself clear?”

  “Crystal, Sergeant.”

  Kate nodded but had nothing more to add so she concentrated on the road and left Gareth to stew. The bare branches on the trees shook and clattered in the wind, and the rain fell heavier. Spray from the cars in front of her and on the opposite side of the road added to the water accumulating on her windscreen. She turned the wipers up to full speed and slowed a little further.

  “Sarge?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She smiled inwardly. Points to the kid. “Not me you need to apologise to, Gareth.”

  He sighed heavily. “I know. I’m just not sure I can bring myself to apologise to him.”

  “Then I’m disappointed.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you were a professional, Gareth. I was wrong. I’m disappointed in myself for getting that wrong.”

  “You’re disappointed in yourself. Why?”

  “Think about it, Gareth. Maybe then you’ll figure out why it’s so important to make an effort with Tom.”

  He sat in silence until they reached the outskirts of King’s Lynn. “Can I ask you something, sarge?”

  “What?” Kate replied tersely.

  “Why do they all call Len Wilder ‘sarge’? He’s a civ. They all are over in CSI.”

  “Because he earned it.”

  Gareth frowned at her, his confusion clear.

  “Len was a police sergeant running the crime scene techs back in 2009 when they changed SOCO to a civilian division.”

  “Because it’s cheaper.”

  “In theory.”

  “It is. My dad said it was. Also, it means you’ve a dedicated force dealing with only that shit and they can keep up with scientific developments better than your average copper. I mean let’s face it, if Tom was a CSI we’d never close a case.”

  “Gareth,” Kate growled the warning.

  “Sorry, but you’ve got to admit, it is more efficient this way.”

  “Yeah. Until we’re stuck waiting on lab results, and forensics and can’t do a damn thing because we’re at the back of the queue.”

  He sat quietly while she navigated the roundabout. “So he was a cop?”

  Kate nodded. “But he loved working in the crime lab so he’d stayed with it. Retired from the police force at fifty, having put in his twenty-five years.”

  “So he took the civilian equivalent post?”

  “Yup. And he’s never looked back from what I gather. His old friends still call him ‘sarge’, and it stuck.”

  She pulled into the car park, and again Gareth was out of the car before she’d put the handbrake on and turned off the ignition. He fed the parking ticket to her as she opened her door and slithered out of the small space. The car to her right was much too close to the line.

  Ruth Anderson was sitting in her office, staring at an array of files cluttering the huge desk in front of her.

  Kate tapped on the already-open door and leaned against the door jamb. “Hi.”

  “Hi, Kate. Gareth,” Ruth said. She scratched her head and stuck the pencil in her hand into her ponytail. There were three others already sticking out of it at odd angles.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Well, there are certainly a lot of reports to go over, but I’m afraid I don’t have anything for you.”

  Kate frowned. “What?”

  Ruth shrugged. “I’ve gone over a hundred and fifty reports so far, and I can’t find anything that would support the theory that these deaths were anything but natural causes.”

  “But there are so many of them.”

  “Yes, but like we said, unfortunately, old, sick people die. It’s a fact of life. These reports all fit with what would be expected as the natural progressions of the diseases they were suffering from.”

  “Such as?”

  Ruth lifted the file in front of her. “This man had lung cancer. He’d been prescribed massive doses of morphine and he died in his sleep. Heart failure due to oxygen deprivation. The tumours were probably so advanced that he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his body.”

  “Probably? Didn’t the autopsy show if they were or not?”

  “There was no autopsy, Kate. There was no need for one. He
was dying of cancer. He was riddled with it. All his earlier tests showed that. A dying man died. There’s nothing suspicious in that.”

  “Were autopsies performed on any of these people?”

  Ruth shook her head. “An autopsy is only carried out if there is need of one. If the death was suspicious, untimely, or there are signs of violence or unnatural causes. In every one of these cases there was no reason to carry out an autopsy.”

  “So we can’t be sure that there was nothing to find, because no one even looked.”

  “There was no reason to look.”

  “For fuck’s sake.” Kate banged her fist on the wooden desk. “We’re talking about people here. People with lives, and families who loved them. Why didn’t anyone look?”

  Ruth shrugged. “It’s easy to miss things in isolation. You know that. When you see things all together, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to see the missteps taken. But in the moment, with nothing else to guide your judgement, we tend to go with the axiom of whatever seems the most likely as being the right answer. Sick people die all the time, Kate. Old people die. There was no reason to think it was anything else. No reason to look any further.”

  “What about now? Is there reason enough to look now?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because almost every one of them was cremated. Most people are these days. Cemeteries are crowded, space is expensive, so cremations are the funeral method of choice. I can’t examine ashes.”

  “So there’s nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate scrubbed her hands over her face and ran her fingers through her hair. “Okay, thanks for looking.” She pushed off the door jamb.

  “Not so fast.”

  Kate turned back to Ruth.

  “I’ve put an alert out to all GPs who attend Brancombe House. The next resident to pass away will come to me for examination before being released to a funeral parlour.”

  “So you’ll do an autopsy then?”

  Ruth shook her head. “No, I said examination. I won’t perform an autopsy unless my examination reveals cause to.”

  “But what can you find in an examination?”

  “I’ll run blood tests and a toxicology screen. I’ll also do a thorough examination of the body. If there is any evidence that the person didn’t die of natural causes, I’ll find it.”