by Andy Maslen
As a man convicted of causing death by careless driving, Edwin Deacon was surprised to find himself at Long Lartin at all. When the screw on duty pointed at the corridor that led to F Wing, Deacon’s eyebrows shot up. And his mouth dropped open.
“That’s for Rule 45ers, sir. That can’t be right. They must have got the paperwork wrong or something. You can’t put me with the nonces.”
The screw just grinned. He leaned close to Deacon and placed his mouth against his left ear. “You’re fucked, mate,” he whispered.
Deacon had just finished unpacking his few possessions when he heard the scrape of his cell door opening. He whirled round. The doorway was filled by a barrel-chested prisoner whose biceps bulged so tightly against the sleeves of his pale-blue prison shirt, they threatened to split the seams. He was stone-faced, with dark, emotionless eyes like a shark’s staring straight at Deacon. His shaved and shining scalp bore tattoos of lizards on both sides, crawling from the nape of his neck towards his rumpled forehead.
The man eased himself into the cell, to be followed by two more. They were well built, though not on the scale as their leader. Both had the same shaved skulls and the same cold, calculating look. The second man, taller than the other two, closed the door behind him. That’s when Deacon noticed the table legs that slid down the inside of each man’s right arm and into his fist.
“You’re a nonce,” the first man said, in a low growl, his accent from somewhere in the northeast, “which normally means we start with a welcoming committee, followed by the fines you have to pay. But given what you got sent down for, we decided to skip that bit.”
Deacon stood, hands raised, palms outward, shaking, his mind racing to find the words that might save him.
“Look, there’s been a mistake. I’m death by careless driving. I’m not a n–”
The table leg, which had been fashioned in the prison’s woodwork shop, was not an elegant, lathe-turned affair. It was cut from square-profile stock and apart from six inches at the end where the man’s beefy hands were wrapped around it, yet to be sanded. The crunch and snap as it connected with Deacon’s right elbow were almost immediately drowned out by his scream. Two follow-up blows from the second and third men broke Deacon’s knees. He collapsed forward onto his face, weeping and screaming. From that point, his life was forfeit. The three shaven-headed men took turns to smash their clubs down onto Deacon’s back and head. When a pool of deep-plum-coloured blood welled suddenly from beneath his ruined face, they stepped back, looked at each other and nodded. Then they left.
*
In the basement, the next day, Reg the Veg was frowning and rootling about in the paperwork that threatened to engulf his desk.
“What’s up, Reg?” Stella asked as she walked up to him between two rows of filing cabinets.
“Forgot my sandwiches, didn’t I?”
“Didn’t Karen pack your briefcase this morning, then?”
Reg’s face puckered into a deeper frown. His trademark, I’m-mad-me grin had entirely disappeared. “Err, no. We had words this morning. Told me I could make my own lunch. I did, but I must have left it on the kitchen counter. You know, with the stress of it and everything.”
“Tell you what, Reg. I was just about to go out and get something for myself. I’ll buy you lunch. M&S sandwiches all right?”
His face brightened and he smiled. “That’s very kind of you, Stel. I mean, you know, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Oh, no, Reg. It’s no trouble at all. Not for me, anyway. “It’s fine. Egg mayo, right? That’s your favourite, isn’t it?”
“You noticed, then? Great little detective you are, and no mistake. Yep. Good old egg mayo. Preferably no cress, but I’m not fussy. I can always pick it out.”
“Okay. I’ll get some crisps and a drink. What do you want?”
“Salt and vinegar and a Diet Coke please. I’ll pay you when you get back.”
“Don’t be daft,” she said, smiling. “I said, my treat.”
She left then, checking the contents of her bag on the way out of the door.
In the local branch of Marks & Spencer, Stella mingled with the office workers buying their lunches, watching as outstretched hands hovered between the reduced-fat options and the salads or the New York-style deli specials and two-inch-thick, high-fat sandwiches that actually filled you up and tasted of something else besides virtuous self-denial.
“Excuse me,” she said, squeezing an arm between a fat guy in an ill-fitting grey suit that strained across the shoulders and a pair of twenty-something girls teetering on six-inch heels and wearing that species of full, matte makeup that always reminded her of shop-window dummies. She snagged an organic egg-mayonnaise sandwich with watercress – sorry, Reg – and a pastrami on rye for herself.
After the almost surgical cleanliness of the supermarket, Stella’s next stop felt more like the sort of place where she’d find what she was looking for: a drab convenience store lit by soul-destroying neon strip lights that gave even the fresh vegetables a deathly pallor. She headed towards the back of the shop where a couple of noisy chiller cabinets were squeezed between racks of toilet paper and disposable nappies. At the back of the left-hand chiller, sitting in a puddle of sticky, pink liquid, was a shrink-wrapped, black polystyrene tray containing a chicken quarter.
Her route back to the station took her past a small urban park, little more than a square of scrappy grass bordered by beds full of daffodils and a handful of birch trees. It was too early in the year for people to be eating their lunches outdoors, and the park was deserted apart from a handful of snaggle-toothed boozers at one end laughing and coughing in liquid gurgles as they swigged from cans in green, gold and black. You got pretty close, Stel, don’t forget that. Stella shuddered.
She chose a bench as far away from the winos as possible. It backed onto a beech hedge, still rustling with the previous year’s brittle brown leaves, which shielded her back. Ahead, she had a clear view of both entrances to the park. She took the pouch containing the hypodermic syringe from her bag and ripped open the top edge with her teeth. Holding the portion of shrink-wrapped chicken steady inside the carrier bag, she inserted the needle through the black plastic tray and into the blood. She tipped the tray a little and then withdrew the plunger, watching as the bloody juice fountained up inside the plastic body of the syringe against the green rubber stopper.
Out came the needle with a tiny high-pitched squeak against the polystyrene tray. Next, she pulled out Reg’s sandwich. Finding a glued join in the outer, she pushed the needle between the two thin sheets of cardboard and into the soft, whitish-yellow filling of the sandwich. Using her thumb, she pushed the plunger down with a steady pressure, easing the needle out as she did, so that its payload wouldn’t be concentrated in one spot. Finally, it was done. She squeezed the join in the cardboard between thumb and forefinger and pushed the sandwich packet back inside the bag. One of the winos had noticed her. He looked over and called out in a voice roughened by booze, fags, or just hard living.
“Hello, darlin’! Come over and have a swig if you like. It’s Special Brew 2010 – a particularly good year!”
His friends cackled at this flight of wit, then turned back to their drinking. Stella wrinkled her nose, shook her head and left the park. On the way back to Paddington Green, she dropped the syringe, minus its needle, down a drain. The needle she placed inside an empty drink can she found resting on the top of an overflowing rubbish bin, crushing the can to trap the evidence at the bottom. The portion of chicken went into a second rubbish bin, a large commercial number in thick green plastic at the back of a fast food place. All that remained was lunch.
“Here you go,” Stella said with a smile, handing over the carrier bag to Reg, who was staring intently at the monitor of his ageing Pentium III desktop computer when she arrived back in the basement at just after twelve thirty.
He barely looked up, acknowledging her gift with a perfunctory “Cheers, Stel,” reaching out for
the bag, which she hooked over his outstretched fingers.
“Enjoy!” she said, retreating to her own desk. It was a cheap, battered, plywood-and-steel construction with a dodgy screw-in foot on the front right corner that needed a folded wad of paper to keep it from rocking.
Even though she knew the raw chicken blood would take a while to work its mischief in Reg’s digestive system, she couldn’t help but keep an eye on him as he opened the packaging and took out the sandwich. He tutted as he saw the broad, flat leaves of the watercress. Over the next two-and-a-half minutes, he picked out every single leaf and stem and deposited them on the thin, cellophane film window. Content that he wouldn’t be ingesting anything green, he took a huge bite, chewed it with his mouth open, then swallowed. Stella was mesmerised by the way his prominent Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. He caught her looking.
“What’s the matter, Stel? Never seen a man eating before?” Then he blushed. “Shit! God, I’m so sorry. What an eejit. I was just, you know–”
“It’s fine,” she said, with a reassuring smile. Given I’ve just fed you poison. Knock yourself out.
After this, they ate their sandwiches, crunched their crisps and swigged their drinks in companionable silence, with just the whirring of the computers’ cooling fans to break it.
The first intimations of disaster came about ninety minutes later. Stella had been keeping Reg under observation, flicking her gaze away from the spreadsheet she was updating to check on his skin colour, and look for any obvious signs of intestinal discomfort. Then, bingo!
He pulled a face, twisting his lips and frowning, while placing a hand carefully over his stomach. He belched loudly, then frowned.
“You all right, Reg?” she asked.
“Not sure. The old guts are sending up smoke signals, and I don’t think it’s to announce a party.” His eyes widened, suddenly. “No, actually, gotta go, Stel, ’scuse me.”
For a big man, Reg could move fast when he needed to. And he obviously needed to now. He skirted the corner of his desk, skimming it with his left hip, and was off down the canyons of filing cabinets, heading for the door to the corridor beyond and the toilets.
She screwed her eyes tight as she strained to hear any audible signs of distress, but only caught the bang of the door closing behind Reg.
Ten minutes passed. She nibbled the second half of her own sandwich while wondering just how rapidly Salmonella bacteria could multiply in the human gut and at what point their numbers would cause someone to feel the effects of their burgeoning population growth.
Just as she was worrying that she might have overdone it and Reg was dying on his knees in front of the toilet, he reappeared in the doorway of the exhibits room. His face was gleaming wetly in the light from the fluorescent tubes overhead. It was the colour of fresh putty. His mouth was hanging half-open, and he was clutching the door jamb as if it were the only thing between him and death. Which she reflected, perhaps it was.
“Oh, my God, Reg. What happened? Are you okay? You look like a fucking corpse.”
“Not sure,” he groaned. “Must have been the egg mayo. That’ll teach me to get shop sandwiches. No offence.”
“None taken.”
“Oh, God!” he moaned before executing a smart about-turn and darting back to the security of the gents’.
The second time he appeared, Stella took charge.
“Give me your keys, Reg. I’m taking you home.”
Until this point, she hadn’t considered how she would remove Reg from the station. Now she found herself behind the wheel of his eight-year-old Honda CRV four-by-four, and she wasn’t happy about it. Although compared to Reg, she was ecstatic. He was writhing now, clutching his stomach and moaning softly, his face smeared with sweat, while he gave off a sickroom odour that made her buzz the windows down on her side and his.
Somehow, she controlled her own feelings of incipient panic as she negotiated the three-mile drive to the semi-detached house he shared with the homely Karen, his wife of thirty-one years. Having got him in through the door and up the stairs to their bedroom, Stella beat a retreat, promising to call in the morning to see how he was getting on.
Forty minutes later, she was back in the exhibits room. On her own. Finally.
It was two fifteen. She pulled up HOLMES – the Home Office Large Enquiry System – and entered a search term.
“Richard Drinkwater + hit and run + 2009”
Moments later, she was staring at a home screen for the case that had turned her life upside down just thirteen months earlier.
Hit and run: 06/05/2009–CASE NO. F/PG/658832/67
File created by: P Evans
Ignoring the entries relating to the prosecution and conviction of Edwin James Deacon for causing death by careless driving, she clicked on the tab for evidence and then drilled down to the physical evidence window. She scanned the list of items recovered from the scene. Nothing much to go on. No fingerprints, obviously. No DNA, ditto. Not even any rubber from the road surface. Deacon hadn’t even touched the brakes to scuff his tyres on the tarmac. She ground her teeth together as she imagined, once again, the movie projected in her head of Deacon, pissed or tweaking, barrelling into Richard’s car and snuffing out the life of one of the only two people in the world who meant anything to Stella. Apart from glass fragments and bits of Richard’s own car, the evidence list was empty.
CHAPTER TEN
Absence of Evidence
“NO, NO, NO, this isn’t possible,” she hissed into the empty air. “There has to be something. There has to be!”
Somehow, Stella had convinced herself that once she got Reg out of the way, the case would open up before her like the pages of a pop-up book. She’d pull them away from each other, and the fairy-tale castle with its turrets and flags would present itself with the evidence she needed to convict Deacon of murder stuck on its topmost tower. Her breathing came in short gasps as the castle crumbled, raining shards of stained glass on the handsome prince climbing up the outside and decapitating him.
Head in hands, she forced herself to stay calm and to follow the mantra she’d had drilled into her at Hendon and on numerous courses since – that it was a detective’s job to think.
All evidence from a crime scene had to be logged against the case number. Standard procedure unless you wanted never to find anything ever again. That way the databases would all speak to each other, and you could find what you wanted. It might be a needle in the exhibits room haystack, but as long as you had the right case reference, you could find it in seconds. She had the right case number, but the database search was telling her there was nothing to find.
“Come on,” she breathed, “give me something. I’ve waited so long for this.”
She leaned back and stared at the ceiling, massaging the back of her neck. Then she frowned.
Somewhere in the primitive part of her brain, a buzzer had just gone off. A buzzer that said, Hey! I just noticed something important and we should do something about it now. Had Stella been a cavewoman, that “something important” would have been large, fierce and possessed of long, sharp teeth. Now it was a piece of information. Equally important, but unlikely to consume her for its dinner.
It was something Reg had said the other day. She couldn’t retrieve the memory.
“For fuck’s sake!” she moaned, rubbing her scrunched up eyes with her fingers.
Then she removed her fingers and opened her eyes. That was it. That was what Reg had said the other day. FFS. Not the expletive, but Fat Finger Syndrome. He switched numbers around when he was typing. That was why he tried to avoid it.
She leaned forward and stared at the screen again. She shook the mouse impatiently and when the screen glowed back into life, clicked back out to the case home screen.
There it was. The case number.
Hit and run: 06/05/2009–CASE NO. F/PG/658832/67
File created by: P Evans
Could it be this simple? Stella opened the search box and
rekeyed the case number.
F/PG/568832/67
She held her breath. Said a quiet prayer. And hit Return.
The hour-glass icon rotated in a series of one-hundred-and-eighty-degree jerks.
Stella could hear her pulse roaring in her ears.
Then it stopped and the screen refreshed. Still no evidence.
“Come on, Reg, please tell me you fucked up your typing.”
She tried again.
F/PG/658823/67
She held her breath, willing the screen to yield its secrets. After another agonising wait, the screen refreshed with the same depressing message.
“One more go. Please, be there. Please!” she almost shouted.
F/PG/658832/76
The hourglass went through its routine again. Stella stared so hard she thought she could feel the blood in her own eyeballs pulsing. The hourglass stopped tumbling.
And there it was: a single record logged against the non-existent case file. An evidence reference.
F/PG/658832/76-E/RW/1
The same case reference, then E for evidence, RW for Reggie Willing and 1 – indicating it was the first, and only, exhibit.
She clicked it.
ITEM: paint chip
CASE REF: F/PG/658832/76
EXHIBIT: 1
LOCATION: M71
Stella let out a slow, audible breath, somewhere between a groan and a gasp.
“Thank you, God,” she said, staring at the reference and gripping the edges of the screen with white-knuckled fingers and thumbs. “And you, Reg. Sorry about the food poisoning.”
She scribbled the reference onto a scrap of paper and left to find the shelf in the exhibits room where the paint chip had been misfiled.