“It’s funny,” she said as Tony put on his CAT hat, “I never realised it before.”
“What?”
“The smoke alarm.”
“What about it?”
“It stopped. All by itself.”
Tony dragged his coat on, shrugging into it. “It’s what they do. They only ring for—”
“It was like I’d gone deaf. I could hear myself breathing again; I could hear myself moaning at the pain in my hand. I could hear Michael talking as well as screaming.”
He stared at her, absorbed.
“The oven was turned off. I didn’t do that.”
Tony continued to stare at her, beard twitching slightly. And then his eyes moved away and he licked his lips. “I guess he did it before he stabbed himself, eh?”
I’m sure it was high on his to-do list. Kill myself. Oh wait, turn off the fucking oven first. She nodded to herself, shrugged, and said, “I suppose he must have.”
“Make sure you’ve got all the bits of broken cup up before you start walking round here in bare feet.” He opened the door. “And remember what I said about Sidmouth. Time to get your pride back, Jess.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Eddie climbed into the Discovery, cigarette hanging from slack lips, and mind chasing its tail about the future.
He thought the visit from Weismann was very interesting indeed. Strange that the head of CSI at Major Crime would come all the way out here for the keys to a van that no one would need to use in the near future. “It was a recce,” he told himself as he started the engine. He wondered what excuse Weismann would use for his next visit.
He wondered two more things to such a degree that he forgot to put the car in gear, and just sat there chewing over them. How were the others doing, and when would things get back to normal?
They need to, soon – for everyone’s sake.
Perhaps he ought to go and see the top dog and explain what happened. Surely someone must have a brain cell they could borrow just for today? No way could MCU operate without a dedicated CSI department, and everyone knew it. They’d be shocked. Surely.
Eddie wasn’t sure at all, actually. Crawford obviously thought that Major Crime needed CSI, but his predecessor, Francis Cooper, had tried to obliterate the department. Eddie smiled, reminiscing about how Cooper had tried to obliterate him, but the department had just happened to be in the way.
All this thinking was for another time, because right now the purpose of Eddie starting the car finally made itself known, and he selected reverse gear just as a plain blue Corsa parked right behind him.
Eddie put the car back into park and opened the door, expecting to see Weismann again, but it was Benson who climbed out.
“Thought I could smell shit,” Eddie said, straight-faced.
“What the hell happened to your department?”
“Turned out that it wasn’t my department at all. I was only borrowing it. Now it belongs to your boss’s daughter. Probably a birthday gift. Easier to look after than a pony or a puppy.”
Benson shook his head, hands on hips. “You really are so full of shit. In fact, I never realised just how full of shit one man could be.”
“You want a mirror?”
“Very funny. Get in; you’re coming to a scene with me.”
“But I’m off the books.”
“No, you’re not. You might be out of MCU CSI, but you’re still in West Yorkshire Police. So start earning your money. Get in.”
* * *
Eddie flicked the cigarette end out of Benson’s side window. “Do you know anything about Facebook?”
“What? What do you want to play with that shit for?”
“My dad got himself a woman by playing out on Facebook.”
“You want a woman?”
Eddie sighed. This was much harder than he’d expected. “Forget women. Do you know about Facebook?”
“Not really. I was never much of a conversationalist. I prefer keeping myself to myself. You know me: shrinking violet.”
Eddie looked across at him, unsure if he was just taking the micky.
“I never saw the need to advertise what I had for dinner, and I hate kittens and puppy videos. I suppose you need to ask a youth.”
“Thank you for your wisdom, Glasshopper.”
“So tell me why Nicki has cleaned your office and put her name on the door.”
“You’re joking – me and those stains go back a long way.” He sighed. “I’m fed up of thinking about it. Daft bitch wants the hassle of my job, she can have it. I’m not going to talk about it.” For the next ten minutes, Eddie filled Benson in about the drugs test, and how it became public knowledge thanks to Nicki’s big mouth, and how Troy now felt the need to punch him every time he laid eyes on him. His jaw still ached.
Benson finally got a word in. “I asked her to do this, you know. She told me to come back tomorrow.”
“What are we doing, exactly?”
Benson entered Beeston, cruised into the McDonald’s drive-thru, and got them a couple of coffees. In the car park, as he added three sugars, he said, “Khan and his team are still working the twenty-odd people Marchant represented. He’s less than halfway through.” He tutted. “And he has seven staff working it with him.” He looked at Eddie. “Seven. Back in the day, we’d have rattled that lot off and been in the boozer since Tuesday.”
“How I miss the good old days.”
“Why do you always have to be so sarcastic?”
“Because I find talking straight very boring. No fun at all.”
“You just did it – talked straight.”
“And I was right; it was no fun at all. Anyway, enough of this bollocks, how far have you got with your end of the shitty stick?”
Benson put the lid on his coffee and took a slurp. “I had four to look at, remember?”
Eddie lit another cigarette and opened the window.
“Why don’t you take up vaping instead of smoking that stuff?”
“Because it annoys you. Now tell me, before I beat you to death.”
Benson wound down his own window. “Of the four, one was a woman out on licence; one was a rapist-killer who didn’t have an alibi – but it turned out he was in London the day Marchant had open throat surgery. So he does have an alibi now. Erm, one was inside, and the last one was a certified fruitloop.”
“So that leaves the woman.”
“Correct.”
“You could have just said that we were going to see a woman. It would have been quicker.”
“Are you in a rush?”
“No, but—”
“Well, shut up then.”
“You said the woman didn’t look fit enough to swing an axe.”
“I know. And the axe-thief was a man. But she has to know something, doesn’t she?”
Eddie shrugged. “I don’t know. I just keep thinking about Doc Bolton and the woman’s shoes we found at his scene.”
“Small feet, you said. Not necessarily—”
“No, not necessarily a female’s, granted.”
“Well, let’s go shake a tree, eh?”
Chapter Forty-Six
Eddie was thinking about Doc Bolton’s scene again, and about the Nike Cortez trainer marks they’d found in blood on the kitchen floor. How small they were. And it struck him what a strange crime it was: women rarely stab someone to death unless they’re being threatened. It was a classic domestic killing scenario. But it wasn’t often you’d find that kind of death outside of a marital ding-dong.
He wondered about the robbery – or rather, about the fact that there was no robbery so far as they could tell.
It’s personal. Has to be.
Having avoided the potholes along Elland Road, they were now waiting to turn right onto Cemetery Road. A lorry passed them, then another. Benson tapped his steering wheel as a bus drove past and indicated to stop.
A woman wearing a beanie hat and a red t-shirt ran across the road in front of them, also aiming
for the bus stop. Eddie watched as the bus set off again, and the woman came to a halt seconds later, bent over in defeat, hands on her knees.
Benson looked left and then right, and made a dash for it, heading up the hill towards Beeston. But without warning he slammed on the brakes, and Eddie’s seatbelt locked. Tyres squealed behind them, and angry drivers sounded their horns. Eddie looked across. “What’s up?”
Benson indicated right and tried to spin the car around in the middle of the road.
“The fuck are you doing? This isn’t Miami Vice!”
“I saw him.” Benson revved the motor, both hands pulling the wheel as hard right as they could, edging out into oncoming traffic, oblivious to the cars behind him still sounding their horns.
“Who?”
A van coming towards them stopped and waved Benson round.
“Anytime you’re ready is good with me,” Eddie said.
“The cat man.” Benson screwed the little car’s engine through each gear. “On the bus that went past.” He indicated left and sped down Top Moor Side. “The man with the CAT hat. Top deck.”
“He was on the bus?”
Benson ignored Eddie, bounced over a mini roundabout and down Domestic Street where the bus was already indicating to pull away from another bus stop. He pulled the car in front and got out, slamming the door.
People going about their business stopped, watching with mouths open. Some got out their phones and began recording. It was the done thing these days – trying to catch out the coppers and ridicule them on social media.
“Bell end,” Eddie said, following. “You’re too old to play Starsky and Hutch!” he yelled, but Benson was already climbing aboard the bus. When Eddie caught up, the driver had his arms folded, and Benson was walking towards the rear. Eddie hopped up the step and asked the driver to close the doors behind him and to keep them closed.
The driver shrugged, flicked a switch and the doors closed as Eddie climbed the steps to the top deck. He looked at them all. No one was wearing a yellow baseball cap. Those who didn’t have their eyes down concentrating on a book, or had earphones in listening to some cool tunes, studied him, wondering what the hell was happening. “Has anyone seen a man wearing a yellow baseball cap?” he asked, and heard Benson echoing his question on the lower deck.
A kid put his hand up.
Eddie nodded.
The kid pointed out of the window. Eddie followed his finger and saw a man running along an alleyway, saw the tiniest glimpse of a yellow cap just before he was swallowed by a spinney of trees. “Was he on this bus?”
The kid nodded. “I got on with him up Beeston Hill.”
Eddie raced back down the stairs, yelling, “Open the doors, open the doors!”
He had to wait a second or two and then he was out, vaguely aware that Benson was behind him. By the time he reached the pavement at the back of the bus, he was already out of breath. And then he rushed across the road, ignoring the shouts and gestures from angry drivers, and sprinted towards the alleyway, running through bushes and trees. As he ran, he saw broken bottles, needles, and junk lining the path. At the far end, the bushes and trees stopped. And so did Eddie, next to a series of concrete bollards put there to prevent kids on stolen motorbikes using the path as a short cut.
To his left was another path running through a viaduct arch; straight in front, a path running into a housing estate; and to his right, a third path that ran into a light industrial estate.
He panted, scanning each one.
He heard slow, heavy footfalls behind him, and a few seconds later Benson came to a halt at his side, breathing hard, sounding like he was blowing bubbles into a glass of milk with a straw. “You sound like shit,” Eddie said, throat and legs on fire, lungs having come straight out of ten minutes in the microwave.
Benson grunted, and eventually said, “Fuck.” Thirty seconds later, he finished the sentence with, “You.”
* * *
Benson pulled up outside a long, dreary terrace of Victorian houses, mostly converted into bedsits and used as cash cows by absent landlords.
They climbed out, and Eddie found himself staring over the road at a pub car park. He’d dealt with a murder there a few years ago. A shiver ran up his back, and he turned to watch Benson slowly climbing the concrete steps to the front door. He rang the panel of half a dozen buzzers, but even from here Eddie could see the wires hanging out like a frizzed-up hair style. Benson banged on the door but got no reply. And when he tried the door, it was locked. He turned and shrugged at Eddie before returning to the car. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Literally cannot wait.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
She sat still in the near-silence for a whole minute, contemplating Tony’s words – especially the last few: get your pride back, Jess.
Easier said than done. But not impossible.
Jess was sure of two things right now: first, the police would soon come knocking on her door; there were murders now that she was the perfect suspect for, and so why wouldn’t they come? Of course they would, and it wouldn’t be long; today or tomorrow, perhaps.
And second: they’d convince themselves that she was guilty of those murders because she had the perfect motive: payback. It didn’t matter what you called it, they’d find a way to make it fit her, like they had before.
But Jess was about to reclaim her pride. She’d be fucked by all the demons in hell before she’d go to prison again. The plan grew in her mind from the seeds Tony planted: get your pride back, Jess.
She grabbed her beanie hat, slammed the door behind her, and caught sight of him catching a bus that was heading into a traffic jam. She ran down the hill, hoping to get to the next stop before the bus did. But she didn’t make it. She was almost alongside when it just seemed to float away from the bus stop and left her flapping and gasping for breath.
The bus trundled down Top Moor Side, crushed by a glacier of traffic that was slow, but not quite slow enough for her to catch up. A small dark car squealed past. Someone was in a hurry.
She jogged to a mini-roundabout at the top of Domestic Street just as the car swerved in front of the bus, and she saw Tony get off it and dodge his way through the traffic behind. He disappeared from view up the alleyway towards Balm Walk. There was a choice of footpaths there, but she knew he’d slither under the viaduct and away towards the city centre. And that was where she placed her bet, and began jogging.
She arrived at the junction of paths at about the same time as a tall man and a fat man – coppers, obviously, and both out of breath – and kept to the shadows, knowing that Tony was long gone. Eventually, the two men turned and left. She looked at the viaduct, annoyed that she’d missed him. Still, it would keep. She’d find out where he lived sooner or later.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Eddie chose not to drive home.
He had some thinking to do first, but strangely he found himself in the car park of Killingbeck Police Station – a place he’d vowed never to visit again. He looked up at the roofline, at the weeds growing out of the gutter, and the fat pigeons gossiping on the apex.
Everyone assumed that being on the top floor of any police station meant you’d made it, that you were the top dog and on top dollar. But there was a room on the top floor of Killingbeck police station that wasn’t like that at all.
It was spacious – providing there was only one of you working in it. Not quite so spacious if there were three of you in there. And the view through the only window into the courtyard below wasn’t exactly resplendent: you got an AC motor above and a water pipe just below it. Either way, the window wouldn’t open because of the pipe and even if it did, you’d get bombarded by pigeon shit. And it was such an awkward window to get to that it hadn’t been cleaned since the station was built in the late eighties.
The room number was GD13; someone had modified it slightly to read GOD. Eddie knocked and entered, figuring this would be a nest of deaf people and the chances of anyo
ne inside hearing him were pretty slim.
He was right. There were three of them in there – one wearing a green cardigan and typing into an old keyboard using his two index fingers, his back to the rest of the office, bald head glaring under the fluorescent lights. Then there was the self-appointed boss, the one wearing a tank top and shirt sleeve garters, who was parked against the far wall where he would be able to observe his minions if he wasn’t asleep.
Eddie blew out a sigh and walked in towards Jeffery.
He dropped into a seat opposite him and took a deep breath of the old man smell, in which Old Spice played a minor role. Jeffery put down his pen and looked up. “If you’ve come to gloat, you can piss off.”
“I expected to see your Zimmer frame in the car park.”
“Humour hasn’t improved, then?”
“I tried to ring…”
Jeffery frowned. “He doesn’t allow us… He prefers our phones on silent.”
Eddie nodded, checked his laughter so as not to wake the bossman. He changed the subject. “Who did that to your door plate?”
“The God thing?” Jeffery nodded towards the ‘boss’. “It’s more a reflection on how close we are to dying up here than how close we are to Him. This is the Operation Research Facility.” Jeffery ran a finger around his collar. “Otherwise known as the Obscure Research Fuckup. It’s where they send the people like me who they want out but don’t really want to fire. I think the altitude kills us off fairly quickly; oxygen’s in short supply up here.”
It was good to see Jeffery’s smile, and Eddie tried not to let his sorrow at his old boss’s position colour his face as he asked, “Why did you just walk?”
“When Weismann came?”
Eddie nodded.
“If there’s a bull coming at you, I think it’s better to stand aside than try to reason with it.”
The Death of Jessica Ripley Page 17