Dead and Gone: A gripping thriller with a shocking twist (DI Annie Parker)

by D. L. Michaels

  ‘You can, mate, but we can’t watch it for you,’ says a chubby guy in whites, with tats all down his left arm. ‘We’re finishing our break in a minute.’

  ‘No worries.’

  I go back around the other side of the pub, only to see the police car that had been outside my place pullin’ into the car park.

  110

  Annie

  Dee is back home. Safe in the nest, as Mum used to say when we were kids and she tucked us up at night. True to tradition, I’ve bullied my sister to bed with a box-set and a tin of best chocolate biscuits.

  I have to say, given what she’s been through, she looks amazing. Not fit to run-a-marathon amazing, but smiling, bright-eyed and optimistic, weight-lifted-off-shoulders amazing. Apparently, bilateral mastectomies really are routine these days and need no more than twenty-four hours in hospital.

  I’d read that the procedure was relaxed, but hadn’t believed it. I’d even watched videos posted by brave, wonderful women before, during and after their ops, but I still hadn’t thought Dee would strike that lucky.

  Thankfully, she has!

  According to the doctors, her sutures look really good and, providing she doesn’t lift anything over ten pounds, i.e. Polly, or any plate of food Tom makes, then she’s going to enjoy a fast and perfect recovery.

  Right now, in between my sisterly duties of providing cups of tea, books, snacks, magazines and small talk, I’m clearing up days of strewn washing and unwashed plates and pans. My chores are interrupted by a call from DCI Goodwin.

  ‘Yes, boss,’ I answer, with the handset lodged between shoulder and ear as I carry clothes to the washer.

  ‘How’s your sister, Annie?’

  I’d had to tell Goodwin about Dee, in case I’d needed to rush off to be with her. ‘She’s good, sir. Thank you for asking.’ I put my laundry basket down and open the front of the machine. ‘Did our bigamous friend come in today with her solicitor?’

  ‘No, but she called. I’m going to call her Paula Smith to avoid confusion, because I get lost otherwise. She’s coming in tomorrow to go over the statement on the rape.’

  ‘That’s good.’ I start to sort whites from darks. ‘Boss, can’t we cut her some slack re the bigamy charges? She’s been nothing but honest with us and she’s going to go through the ordeal of a rape trial. And, let’s face it, she only stayed married to this pig Danny Smith because he blackmailed her.’

  ‘Any slack we cut her would be a choker for Martin Johnson,' snaps Goodwin. ‘Five years of being lied to by his bigamous wife drove him to shoot and almost kill someone. No, Annie, there's no way I'm cutting slack here.'

  He has a point. Maybe the biggest point of all. ‘We could ask him,’ I say meekly. ‘Ask him if he wants her prosecuted.’

  ‘No, we couldn’t, Annie. We cannot transfer our legal duties and moral burdens to the victims of crimes. We make the tough decisions. We’re paid to do that and live with the consequences. And in this case, I’m making it. She will be charged with bigamy, so stop pleading sisterly compassion for her.’

  I know better than to continue harassing him, so I change the subject. ‘Anything new on Crewe? Any news from our Thai Major?’

  ‘Actually, there is. That’s why I was ringing you. There’s a mail just come through from Sirisopa saying he has obtained computer files showing all of last year’s shipping movements made by Janjira Chaiprasit’s company. They show multiple ties to Crewe Carriers in the UK and to the Dutch port where the yaba was seized.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I enthuse as I load Polly’s darks. ‘And ties to the container the drugs were found in?’

  ‘Yes, that too. It was carrying party straws made in Burma that were then filled with the mini yaba pills before being shipped to Rotterdam via Thailand.’

  I pop a gel wash tab in the drum and set the machine on a forty. ‘Please make my day and tell me the manufacturing company is owned by Ashley Crewe.’

  ‘It isn’t. But it is owned by his partner, Janjira.’

  ‘Is that enough to swing the extradition?’

  ‘To the contrary. These drugs offences all involve illegality on Thai soil. Meaning, the Thais will want to try him there. What may swing extradition is evidence of rape committed in the UK, and the fact that Crewe is living in Thailand under a false name and ID.’

  I can’t resist stating the obvious. ‘What if Paula says she’ll only give her rape statement on condition we drop the bigamy charge?’

  There’s a thoughtful pause, before he answers. ‘Thankfully, that’s a dilemma for the CPS, not us.’

  ‘But will you ask them the question?’

  ‘No, I won’t, Annie. Nor will you put such a suggestion in Paula Smith’s mind.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ I lie. ‘So, what next with Ashley?’

  ‘Sirisopa is putting together a raid on his household premises in Phuket. He’s even trying to fix a satellite link so we can watch it live via their helmet cams.’

  ‘That’s very cool,’ I enthuse.

  ‘Common now, according to my Interpol connections. Anyway, I’ll let you know when it is, in case you can come in.’

  I watch clothes start to tumble inside sudsy water in the washer. ‘It would sure beat the screens I’m watching here at home.’

  111

  Danny

  ‘Beer,’ I say to Lucy, the barmaid, because I fancy one, long, cold one before the cops nick me and put me through another round of hell. Then, to my surprise, as she heads to my usual pump, I add, ‘Non-alcoholic.’

  She stops, glass in hand, and gives me a stunned look.

  ‘Don’t ask, Lucy, just make it quick, please, before I change my mind.’ Truth is, I know things are about to happen and it seems in my mixed-up bonce that when you’re at a crossroads, you should maybe take a new road sober.

  She pops the cap off some bottle kept beneath the counter and out of sight like it’s a dirty book in a newsagent’s and says, ‘Two fifty, please.’

  I give her a fiver, and generously, because I know it might be my last tip for a very long time, tell her, ‘Keep the change.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, with a grin.

  I put the bottle to my lips and swig. It’s cold. Fizzy. Has a vague malty taste. But every cell in my body knows this isn’t alcohol. Cheat. Cheat. Cheat. I can hear all my atoms startin’ up a chant of disapproval, like football thugs.

  I’m chuggin’ the bottle, like it’s sour medicine, when a uniformed plod the size of a basketball player and a chubby brunette in her early thirties come through the door and clock me.

  ‘Danny Smith?’ says the woman.

  I look around and pretend I’m tryin’ to see who she’s talking about.

  ‘Not funny.’ She holds out a copy of my prison mugshot. ‘I know exactly who you are.’

  ‘Then why ask?’

  Humorously, she adds, ‘I’m Detective Constable Megan Billen and I’d like you to come down to the station with us, please.’

  ‘I’ve got to tell you, that’s not a great chat-up line.’ I take another belt of my pretend beer. ‘I mean, it’s no better than “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” or “Do you come here often?”’

  She glances to the giant uniformed plod and he takes this as his cue to step closer.

  ‘Mr Smith,’ he says with an undertone of menace, ‘we’d appreciate it if you came without any trouble.’

  ‘One tick, then I’m yours.’

  That tick is the time it takes me to finish the bottle.

  I smack my lips and smile at the female cop. ‘Right, gorgeous, lead the way.’

  I know I’ve wound her up. Been sexist. A male chauvinist. Politically incorrect. I’ve been all that. Thing is, if I didn’t make fun out of this, then I’d be manically depressed.

  The car they push me into is a crappy Ford Focus with shagged-out suspension. Because the bizzies have the heatin’ on full, within a couple of miles I start to feel motion sickness. ‘Do me a favour and drop my window, w
ill you? There’s no button back here.’

  ‘What do you want it down for?’ asks Billen, from the front passenger seat.

  ‘Cos unless you give me some fresh air, sweetheart, I’m going to puke all over your back seat.’

  She mutters somethin’ to her mate, then the back-window slides down a few centimetres.

  ‘Come on, luv, I’m not a dog. I need more air than that.’

  The pane glides down further, just enough for me to poke my skull out into the whistling air. I keep it there, my mouth open, like I’m a kid on a summer holiday, until I get brain freeze. ‘All right,’ I tell her. ‘You can put it up again.’

  She obliges and I finally get around to askin’ the big question, ‘Exactly what am I supposed to have done this time? Parkin’ tickets? Looking at old ladies the wrong way?’

  ‘Historic Crimes has some more questions for you,’ she says vaguely.

  ‘To do with what?’

  ‘An historic crime,’ she adds sarcastically.

  ‘Ha, ha. You’re a real funster, aren’t you?’

  ‘Just wait until we get you inside the nick, then you’ll find out,’ she replies, without even lookin’ my way.

  I loll in the back and wonder who else has sat here. Murderers, rapists, terrorists? Or just the odd shoplifter and car thief? Am I the biggest fish these two have ever reeled in? After several miles, we pull up at some large blue iron gates. They electronically slide apart and the patrol car rolls into a secure yard.

  Billen gets out and opens the back door for me.

  ‘Well, thank you most kindly,’ I bow mockingly to her.

  She pushes me towards a steel back door. Her fellow plod opens it for us and my pulse quickens as we step into the custody area. Next comes all the pain-in-the-arse business of passin’ through an airport-style security scanner. I make it beep. Plod makes me turn out my pockets into a plastic tray and go back through again.

  I collect my stuff and a bored sergeant behind a desk doesn’t even glance up as they lead me past him and a block of lock-up cells.

  We go through secure doors into the rest of the nick and memories come flooding back from the last time I was in a cop shop. Arrested for running a dodgy market stall that was sellin’ bent gear and drugs. I spent a long time in one of these tiny lock-ups and thought it was hell, until I went to the Scrubs. That really is Satan’s pad. There are a lot of stories about how cushy the clink is. Don’t believe them. Let me tell you, my spell inside was a bleedin’ nightmare. The place stank of old cheese. The cheese of men. The Cheddar of unwashed armpits and unclean arses. The Gorgonzola of the spit and spunk of stinkin’ strangers.

  Worse than the smell was the lack of space. Seriously, I’ve taken a crap in toilets bigger than my cell. And just to round off the misery, I was banged up with a fuckin’ Nazi. An armed robber and card-carrying BNP bastard called Aidy, who’d punch me in the face if I so much as snored, let alone argued that Hitler was less than a saint.

  All this comes rushing back, as Billen bundles me into an interview room and starts off some tape machine that looks like it’s from the sixties.

  ‘You’ve already spoken to Detective Inspector Parker of the Historic Crimes Unit,’ she says as she pulls out a big smartphone, jabs and swipes at the screen and then half reads from some notes. ‘They have some additional questions they wish me to ask you in relation to the disappearance of a friend of yours called Ashley Crewe.’

  ‘That wanker weren’t no friend of mine.’

  ‘But you know who I mean?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I know who.’

  ‘Good. They want to know if you had contact with Crewe after the allegedly faked murder in Derbyshire.’

  ‘What d’you mean by contact?’

  ‘Contact would constitute any verbal discussion, physical meeting or exchange of information via paper or any electronic kind of medium.’

  ‘What about drums, or smoke signals, you know, like the Indians used to?’ I’m dickin’ around because I don’t want to confirm or deny anything. I mean, admittin’ that I’d been pressured into pretendin’ Ashley Crewe had been killed was understandable, right? If I hadn’t gone along with what Kieran and Raurie had wanted, then there would have been a whole world of pain waitin’ for Paula and me. But this next bit, helpin’ Ash after the event, well, that could open up more bags of trouble, couldn’t it?

  ‘Mr Smith, I should tell you that withholding key information at this stage is certain to increase the likelihood of a custodial sentence for any offence that may have been committed.’

  I don’t fancy that at all. Any chance of startin’ again with Paula and our nipper would be shot to fuckery by another stretch inside. ‘No,’ I finally say. ‘I haven’t had what you’d call contact. Not directly.’

  ‘Indirectly?’

  ‘Listen, it’s like this. Ashley’s brothers maybe wanted things from me, to help him, like. It’s a long time back now, I can’t remember much.’ I look at her and she looks down at her notes. Notes sent by that bleedin’ smart copper who came to see me in hospital, no doubt. I can tell I’m being led into a trap. The bobbies obviously know what I did. That dickhead Ashley clearly didn’t keep his head down, like Raurie said he would.

  ‘These things,’ says Billen, ‘would they relate to issues of identity?’

  Game’s up. She obviously knows somethin’. ‘Yeah, yeah, I remember now. They wanted my passport, so I sent it to them.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I was coming up to twenty-one, the big birthday, and I’m almost forty-one, now, so you do the maths.’

  ‘And you gave this passport to whom?’

  ‘To whom? That’s posh.’

  ‘Just tell me, Mr Smith.’

  ‘The whom I gave it to, was Kieran Crewe. I gave it to Kieran. That’s the middle Crewe brother.’

  She writes his name down and looks through the notes again. ‘Were you told why the passport was wanted?’

  ‘No, but it wasn’t hard to work out, was it? Ashley needed a UK passport to settle somewhere abroad.’

  ‘And how would your passport help him do that?’

  ‘You bein’ naïve or what?’

  ‘Or what,’ she says and adds a challenging stare.

  ‘Until about ten, maybe fifteen years ago, it was piss easy to forge an existing passport. You just got a razor blade, cut the photo out and stuck a new one in. If there was a plastic seal over it, you covered the new pic with cling-film, matched up the edges of the old seal and then used a hairdryer to permanently glue it to the passport.’

  She doesn’t look anything like as impressed as I’d expected her to. ‘And what did you get in return for your passport?’

  I’m going to lie now. Kieran actually gave me a hundred quid, but I’m just goin’ to tell her what I would have got if I hadn’t handed it over. ‘I didn’t get my legs broken. Nor did Paula. That’s what I got.’

  She makes another note. ‘So, you’re saying that you were threatened – and you didn’t financially benefit in any way?’

  ‘I benefited by not having my pins busted.’

  ‘Who made this threat to you, Mr Smith?’

  ‘Kieran Crewe. He said he’d take great pleasure in doin’ it personally.’

  She writes some more, then adds, ‘After handing over this documentation, did you have any other subsequent contact with the Crewe brothers in relation to Ashley?’

  Again, a minefield. Stevie’s words from last night about facin’ up to things ring in my head. ‘Not in relation to Ashley. But you know I was sent to prison because bent gear was being sold off a market stall I owned?’

  She looks at a printout of my conviction. ‘You served twelve months of a two-year sentence?’

  ‘That’s right. Well, that stall were given to me by Raurie Crewe. I’d been skint at the time. Paula, my wife, and me, were strugglin’ and Crewe gave me the stall. And by that, I mean the pitch where the stall was. Oh, and he loaned me a grand to
start it up. Stock and whatnot. The bloke that had run it for them had gone to prison for batterin’ someone. In return, had to pay the grand back and give jobs to some no-marks that worked for the Crewe gang.’

  She looks at a sheet again. ‘And these no-marks, they were your co-accused at the trial – Anthony Pilcher and Mark Sismey – the men who sold drugs, allegedly without your knowledge, from the market stall?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly who they were.’

  She sits back, does some thinking, then says, ‘You know what I think? I think you knew that drugs were being sold on behalf of the Crewe brothers, but you turned a blind eye to it.’

  ‘Then, you’d be wrong. The CPS considered charging me with drugs offences and found no evidence that I had knowledge of such activity.’

  ‘But you did, didn’t you?’ For the first time she smiles, and it’s actually a real nice smile, the kind that makes you smile back.

  ‘Did you, Danny?’

  ‘Why are you lot so suddenly interested in this?’

  She shrugs. ‘Call it curiosity. Historic Crimes are a very curious bunch.’

  I figure it must be somethin’ to do with Paula. Let’s face it, all this started with Ashley’s attack on her, so it must be. Maybe by following Stevie’s face-your-fears philosophy I can help Paula and score some brownie points for myself. ‘I’ll tell you about the drugs, and about the Crewes. Stuff you don’t know. But I want a guarantee that I’m not getting nicked for it.’

  ‘I can’t give you such a guarantee, Mr Smith.’

  ‘Then you best talk to DI Parker, or someone who can.’

  ‘I doubt whether we can reach her at this time of night.’

  ‘Then get a plod to make me a bed up here, because once I leave this station, I’m never coming back – not here, not another cop shop anywhere, ever again.’

  112

  Martin

  I’m sitting in a stupor, staring at the television but not really aware of what’s on. There’s a knock on the door. A triple knock, to be precise. The artist inside me pays attention to detail. There’s a doorbell, but the visitor hasn’t used it. Instead, they’ve knocked. Firmly. Repeatedly. After the Danny Smith incident, I’m very wary of unexpected visitors. Maybe he’s sent some ‘friends’ to beat me up. Perhaps, even to kill me.