by Adam Carter
The voices around her blurred, and then they were gone as Jennifer quickly slipped into merciful unconsciousness.
CHAPTER TWO
She did not have a great deal to do at the scene, but then Constable Caroline Lees did not get too involved with the actual detective work. That was, understandably, for the detectives. It was a career path in which she was certainly interested, but sitting her exams had proved the most difficult thing she had ever attempted. She had already failed them once, but was determined not to mess them up a second time. There were only so many years she was willing to spend in a uniform and, if she was going to work the long hours and receive all the abuse that went with being a police officer, she may as well be doing something she actually enjoyed.
Standing at midnight in the rain, holding an umbrella over a crime scene and the detective working it, was not her idea of doing something she enjoyed.
There were several uniformed constables on the scene and most of them were loitering about the police line stretched around the area. Lees had never much seen the point of the long slice of material upon which ‘police line, do not cross’ was emblazoned, since all it did was encourage people to want to cross it. She supposed television had a lot to do with that. She had seen so many programmes where someone would approach the line, be told not to cross, only to flash a badge and, not looking at the constable, stride boldly through; usually taking along any civilian they wished just so long as they did so with the phrase ‘it’s all right, (s)he’s with me’.
In the opinion of Caroline Lees, television had a lot to answer for.
“This one’s not going to take a whole lot of brainpower to figure out,” Detective Barden said from where he crouched, examining the blood spatter. Lees could not understand what staring at the pattern would achieve, but then perhaps that was why she had failed her detective’s exam. In his late thirties, Barden was about ten years older than Lees. He was a decent guy and had helped her through some of her preparation; he had not even offered platitudes when she had failed, since he knew her well enough to realise it would annoy her. The only person who got away with being nice about it was her boyfriend, and even that was a stretch for her to accept. Barden was good at reading people, which was his greatest strength, and it was a skill Lees had always envied.
He was the one man at the station over whom she didn’t mind holding an umbrella, even though it meant she was herself getting soaked.
From what Lees understood of the situation, there had been a fight between a group of people coming out of a pub a few hours earlier. Being Friday night, that was hardly a surprise. One man had ended up in the river, while everyone else had run away. The man in the water had disappeared and there were officers dredging the river even now. Lees had suspected that anyone falling into a river would just come back up again; she could not believe the currents of any subsidiary of the Thames to be that strong. Since the man had vanished, it showed she knew next to nothing about rivers. Perhaps, she reflected, there were a lot of things she needed to learn if she wanted to pass that detective’s exam any time soon.
“When can we get out of the rain?” she asked.
“If you don’t like standing out in the rain, Carrie, you’re not going to make a good detective.”
“Holding an umbrella over you isn’t exactly what I call good detective work, Ray.”
“You’re not holding it over me; you’re holding it over the crime scene.”
“Makes me feel so much more useful.”
“And you’re holding it over the crime scene because?”
Lees was cold and wet and more than a little hungry. She had no time to even consider stupid questions like that. “To prevent contamination.”
“Nope. Try again.”
She frowned. “Why else would I be standing here in the rain, holding an umbrella?”
“That was what I just asked you.”
She thought about an alternative answer, but nothing sprang to mind. Logically, the only reason to hold such a thing was to keep the rain off someone or something. There was no other purpose for umbrellas. “I give up,” she said. “There’s nothing else an umbrella does.”
“Well, originally they were used to keep the sun off, not the rain. Chinese invention, umbrellas. Useful for so many things. Even for keeping your friends close.”
“So you’ve got me standing here holding this thing because you want me close to you?” Now she was really confused.
“No, because you need me close to you.” He looked at her some more, waiting for her to catch on. Then, with an exaggerated sigh, said, “Because the more time you spend with me at the crime scenes, the more tips you can pick up; and the more tips you pick up, the better you’ll do next time your exam comes around.”
“Oh.”
“You need to think more optimistically, Carrie. The whole world is not out to get you.”
It was something she had already known she had to work on. Lees would not have said she mistrusted people, it was just that she didn’t especially like many of them. Interacting with the public, therefore, was always a chore for her, but it did mean that catching villains proved an especial pleasure for her. Knowing each arrest could effectively ruin someone’s life was the greatest feeling she had ever known.
She had, she hoped, not mentioned any of these feelings during her detective’s exam.
“So,” she said, “what can I learn on this one?”
“That there’s blood on the floor,” Barden said. “Which confirms there was a fight.”
“What, the crowd of witnesses wasn’t enough for you?”
“Not always. People see what they want to see, Carrie. Sometimes people choose not to see what’s obvious. Mainly because they don’t want to get involved, but sometimes they make that decision for other reasons.”
“You’re talking about Appleton, aren’t you?”
Jennifer Appleton was the girlfriend of the man who had fallen in the river. Barden had spoken with her and had sketched out a very vague outline of what she had told him. It had not been much, but then perhaps the young woman was still in shock.
“You think she’s involved?” Lees asked.
“In arranging for her own boyfriend to take a dive? Not likely.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Nothing. I’m just saying people do things for lots of reasons. We can’t afford to assume anything here.”
Lees did not like it when Barden spoke so cryptically, but she had the impression he didn’t actually know anything. “Right,” she said. “Well, have fun with it.”
“I’ve requested you help me on this.”
“Me?”
“You need the experience. It’s been okayed, by the way, so don’t think you have to clear it with your duty sergeant.”
“Then I’m officially helping you with this investigation?”
“You are.”
“So why am I still holding the umbrella?”
Barden smiled. “You know, we’ll make a detective out of you yet.”
Lees was not all that certain whether he was being facetious.
“So, fill me in, then,” she said. “What do we know about the fight?”
“Only that there were three of them and one of him. John Tanner was thirty-three, in excellent shape and the size of a bear. Someone insulted his girlfriend – according to the girlfriend – and the argument spread outside, where Tanner was thrown into the river. We don’t have any names for the three attackers except the one who threw him in. Name of Harry.”
“Hold on, I thought three of them threw him in.”
“By that point one had run off, and the other was in a daze.”
“So this Harry was a human tank?”
“No, just lucky, by all accounts.”
There were several accounts, Lees knew, and if they all pretty much matched, it had to have added up to the truth.
A constable called over to them and they moved to the river. One of the police
divers had surfaced and was shaking his head.
Barden’s grip tightened on the railing. “I don’t think he’s down there. They would have found him by now.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“Without a body, it’s still not murder. I’m assuming Tanner managed to swim to a ladder or something and hauled himself out. If we contact the girlfriend later today, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover he’s turned up.”
“Or maybe he never went missing at all and she was covering because she knew he’d be in trouble.”
“Maybe. Actually, yeah. That’s happened to me before and it’s always annoying.”
“So this isn’t necessarily even a murder investigation?”
“Don’t sound too disappointed.”
“Sorry. Just need something like this. Makes me look good if I’ve helped solve a murder.”
“It probably wouldn’t even be classed as murder anyway, but that’s the vagueness of the law for you.”
“Maybe he’s down there, caught in reeds, and they can’t find him because it’s dark.”
Barden looked at her strangely and she grinned.
“I think we should call it a day,” he said. “We have everything we need from the crime scene and I have a lot of paperwork to get moving in on before we pick up again tomorrow. You want to help me with that?”
“With the paperwork? No thanks, I get enough of my own without doing yours as well.”
“Ours. This is our investigation, remember. Everything I find out, I pass on to you.”
“And, if by some miraculous intervention I find something out, I’ll pass that onto you. But I’m still not doing your paperwork.”
Barden grunted, but he said, “Fair enough. Get yourself home. We’ll start again in the morning.”
The crime scene would stay there without her, and it felt strange for Lees to be heading out before everything was entirely settled. She had done more than her fair share of standing in the rain doing little of anything, telling people to move along. She even used that phrase quite a lot purely because it was what people expected. ‘Move along, nothing to see’.
She decided she was herself going to have to stop watching quite so much television if she was the one coming out with such rubbish.
Barden drove her back to the station, where she had her own car parked. As she drove home, protected from the dark and the rain, she wondered what could have happened to the body of John Tanner. That he was still alive was not something she was even going to entertain, and as she sat at a red light, her wipers slicing through the rain pelting her window, she thought about how this was going to be her chance. Her big chance to prove herself. This was going to make a name for her, and for her to do that, she needed for John Tanner to turn up dead somewhere.
She jumped as someone beeped her from behind, and realised the light had turned to green. Continuing her journey, she shook such destructive thoughts from her mind. She should not have been wishing people dead, it was not exactly the image the police wanted to project. But it certainly would have been a help.
Arriving home, she was pleased to find a parking spot outside her house. Grabbing her bag, she hurried inside and out of the rain, closing the door on the terrible night. Walking to the living room, she dropped her bag and collapsed into a comfortable chair, closing her eyes and knowing she probably should go straight to bed. She had a big day tomorrow and she would need all the rest she could get.
“Carrie?”
She opened her eyes, surprised her boyfriend was still up. She saw him then, sitting on the floor in the corner, his back to the wall, his legs tucked up to his chin. He was wet and trembling. His clothes were torn and his face was a mass of dried blood. He looked at her with wild, almost vacant eyes.
“Harry?” she asked. “What happened?”
Then she remembered the only named assailant of John Tanner. The man who had fought him and thrown him in the river had been called Harry.
Constable Caroline Lees had a sudden desire to see Tanner turn up alive after all.
CHAPTER THREE
He had worked on some difficult cases in the past, but Detective Ray Barden always seemed to end up with the ones without evidence. Occasionally it vanished (which was always worrying), but sometimes it simply wasn’t there at all. This was the first case he had ever worked on, though, where he was investigating a death and did not even have a body. Perhaps what he had said last night to Lees was right, he thought; maybe Tanner had simply scampered out of the river and gone into hiding. He knew Lees had a somewhat twisted sense of morality in hoping the guy was dead, but Barden was beginning to agree with her. Drunken fights caused him so many headaches that he almost would have preferred for them sometimes to end so badly.
Almost. That was the difference between himself and Lees.
Barden had not slept much and had decided to get an early start. He knew even if he stayed at home he would only have been worrying through the case, so he had gone back to the station to review the evidence. Officers had taken over thirty witness statements, and they all said basically the same thing. He was sitting at his desk, slowly going over them while he tried to discern some discrepancy. Someone somewhere knew something, and he firmly believed that should he stare hard enough at the reports, he would be able to find it.
Across the floor, he could see Lees approach. She moved slowly, as though there was something on her mind. She was also still wearing her uniform, and he supposed he had not told her not to bother while she was working the investigation with him. That she was approaching him at all meant he had spent far more hours staring at the witness statements than he had thought, so he pushed them aside and leaned back in his chair as she arrived.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said distractedly. “Had some things to do.”
If she was apologising for being late, Barden didn’t even want to know what the time was.
“There’s nothing in the statements,” he told her. “Divers still haven’t turned up a body.”
“So he’s likely still alive. We should leave it until he turns up. Might be nothing.”
Barden could feel himself frowning. Yesterday, Lees had been eager for it to be a murder investigation, but she seemed to have grown a moral backbone overnight. Still, they could not simply leave the investigation on the off-chance nothing became of it.
He shoved the papers across the desk to her, noting she was still standing rather straight. “Fresh pair of eyes,” he said.
Lees glanced down at the paperwork but did not seem inclined to handle it, as though putting her fingerprints on the statements would somehow implicate her.
“What’s the matter?” Barden asked. “Too much starch in your washing powder? Sit down and take a look.”
Lees obeyed and as she leafed through the paperwork, Barden noticed a speck of blood on her sleeve. It had likely come from the crime scene the night before; the rain was so hard it had flung some of the victim’s blood onto her whenever she had crouched. It meant she hadn’t changed her uniform since the previous night, which showed Barden just how rattled she was.
He softened in his approach with her then. This was clearly affecting her a lot more than she had shown last night. It seemed sleeping on the matter had only brought her nightmares. If she was going to become a detective, that was something she needed to beat out of herself, but it was not Barden’s duty to do so. There were some things Lees had to solve for herself.
Still, he resolved to be a little nicer to her because of it.
“They’re all the same,” Lees said at last. “They all say the same thing.”
“Which likely means they’re all true. Trouble is, we only have the one name to go on. Harry.” He noticed she winced slightly at this, and reminded himself he was treading softly with her. “Don’t let that bother you,” he said. “Most investigations, I don’t even have that much by this point. We also have the descriptions: one scraggly and lanky, with untidy hair, one more muscular with gelled hair,
and Harry.” He paused again before describing him. “Who’s described as average everything, so not likely to be caught easily. The photofit guys are mocking up portraits for our three suspects, but I’ve never much trusted to those things. No one ever turns out to look like their photofit, or at least no one from any of my cases.”
“Are we sure the name’s right?” Lees asked. “Harry. Could it have been Barry?”
“Could have been Carrie for all I know. That was a joke,” he added when she straightened. “God, you’re tense this morning.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah, what happened in the night? Your cat die?”
“No, I …” She composed herself. “Sorry, just not used to all this. I’m good though, you can rely on me.”
“Good. Because I’ll need you if we’re going to find this killer.”
“Potential killer. We don’t have a body.”
“Nice to see you’re back to thinking straight. Question: the witness statements aren’t telling us anything, so what do we do?”
“Give up?”
“Aside from give up.”
“Get more statements?”
“No. I think we have more than enough to annoy us.”
“I don’t know, then.”
Barden could see she really didn’t. “We go talk to the one person who might be able to offer some insight into this.”
Lees shook her head. “And that would be?”
“Carrie, are you being particularly stupid today?” He knew he had intended to be pleasant to her, but enough was enough.
“The girlfriend,” Lees said. “We go visit the girlfriend.”
“That’s right. Honestly, Carrie, whatever’s eating you, you need to push it aside and get on with your job.”