by LJ Ross
“Good,” Samantha said. “I just mean, everything is so regimented.”
“That’s a good word,” MacKenzie said.
“Thanks, I learned it today. We’re studying the Romans in history at the moment, and we’re going to be visiting Hadrian’s Wall in a few weeks.”
MacKenzie thought immediately of the bodies they’d once found stuffed inside that wall, ones that were more recent than any Roman Centurion, but thought it probably fell under the category of, ‘Things not to say to your child before bedtime.’
“That sounds like fun,” she said, instead. “Did you meet any nice friends, today?”
Samantha nodded.
“There’s a girl called Tallulah,” she said. “She’s really funny and smart, and she said I could sit next to her at lunchtimes.”
“She sounds lovely,” MacKenzie said. “We’ll have to invite her around for tea, sometime.”
The timer started to beep, and she reached for a colander.
“Denise?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Thanks for letting me come and stay with you.”
Before MacKenzie could respond, she felt the child’s arms wrap tightly around her waist in a hard hug, before Samantha skipped off again to see what the others were up to.
In the residual quiet, MacKenzie found herself wondering how they’d ever imagined their life was complete without that little bundle of energy, with so much love to give.
* * *
Jack Lowerson sat at the bottom of the stairs in his maisonette, in an area of Newcastle known as ‘Heaton’. It was near the city centre, but far enough from the office to preserve a healthy distance between work and home.
None of that seemed to matter, anymore.
Work had come into his home, and there it would stay.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, staring at the front door, before the little burner mobile vibrated in his jacket pocket again, and his whole body jerked in shock. With trembling hands, he pulled it out and forced himself to look.
It was another text message, which consisted of one word only:
REPORT.
Jack let out a small sound of panic, and almost dropped the phone. He knew what they were doing; he should have seen it coming from the start. Singh, or Ludo, or both of them, planned to use those pictures of him and Rochelle to blackmail him into submission, or risk a professional standards board dismissing him for gross misconduct. They knew he had a dicey history, with his mum serving time, and he could not afford any more marks against his name.
Lowerson sat there a while longer, holding the mobile carefully, like an offering.
Or a set of scales.
Eventually, after night had fallen, he began to type a response:
SURVEILLANCE ONGOING. WILL UPDATE SOON.
After that, he let the phone clatter onto the floor at his feet.
CHAPTER 12
Tuesday, 12th June 2019
Despite the company, Ryan had not slept well.
The new day dawned just as brightly as the last, blazing through the windscreen as he made his way to that most salubrious of destinations: the basement mortuary of the Royal Victoria Infirmary. Tiredness made his eyes water in the bold morning light, and he fumbled for a pair of sunglasses in the central compartment while he navigated the traffic. Rush hour in the morning was unpleasant, but he reminded himself that it wasn’t half as bad as in the capital, where he’d lived for a number of years before deciding to migrate north. In London, every hour was rush hour, and it had been a stressful driving experience. Here, he could mostly sit back and enjoy the ri—
He let out an expletive as a man driving an enormous SUV careened around a mini roundabout, doing at least forty in a twenty zone. Ryan was tempted to flip on his blue light and chase the bloke down, if only to give him a fright, but there were more pressing matters on his mind.
After another tussle finding a parking space, he located Phillips in their usual meeting spot, beneath the canopy beside the service entrance to the mortuary, at the back of the hospital. To Ryan’s great relief, he held two take-away coffee cups in his hands.
“Come here often?” Phillips asked, and handed his friend the stronger of the two.
“More often than I’d like,” Ryan replied, polishing off the coffee in a few deep gulps. “Thanks, I needed that. C’mon, let’s go and see if Pinter’s been missing us.”
Phillips couldn’t imagine the pathologist missing anyone. Then again, Jeff Pinter was a first-rate clinician and, he supposed, an alright sort of bloke. They’d had their run-ins in the past, but he’d never let them down.
As they made their way down the flights of stairs towards the corridor that would take them to the mortuary, Phillips stole a nervous glance at his friend.
“What?” Ryan asked, dubiously.
“Nothing!” Phillips replied, a shade too quickly. “It’s just that…well, you know how Samantha idolises you.”
Ryan made a raspberry sound.
“I’d hardly say that, Frank. If anything, she idolises you, after all the kindness you’ve shown her.”
Phillips glowed with pride.
“Well,” he said gruffly. “There might be different kinds of admiration. And, when it comes to you, son, our Samantha definitely has the other kind.”
Ryan was interested in his friend’s life, but less concerned with his foster daughter’s pre-teen hormones.
“Frank—”
“I’m getting to it,” Phillips waved him away, and they reached the double doors at the end of the corridor, behind which lay their final destination. “The top and bottom of it is, Samantha’s signed us up for a talk at the school, and she won’t take no for an answer.”
Ryan paused in the act of entering the security code for the doors.
“Come again?”
“The school were looking for some interesting speakers for their assembly, next week, and she’s signed us both up.”
“I—” Ryan wondered if it was possible to die from acute panic. “I’ve never done a school talk before.”
“How bad can it be?” Phillips reasoned. “It’s just a bunch of primary school kids. They’ll probably want to know a bit about what we do.”
Ryan looked meaningfully at the plaque on the door, then back at his sergeant.
“We don’t want to give them nightmares,” he pointed out.
“Aye, well, we don’t need to go into any gory details, do we? Maybe show them our badges, remind them not to do drugs…that sort of thing.”
“Frank, I’ve got a list as long as your arm of more important things to be doing,” Ryan said. “There’s a manhunt underway, in case you haven’t noticed.”
To illustrate the point, he nodded towards one of the posters of Ludo which had been tacked onto the wall, with a caption that simply read: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
“I know, but it’d make her happy if we could manage it, and I think she wants to make a good first impression.”
Ryan berated himself for being all kinds of soft touch, but found himself nodding dumbly.
“Alright, you win,” he said, tugging open the mortuary door. “But that was dirty cricket, old man, telling me it’d make Samantha happy. You knew I wouldn’t be able to say ‘no’.”
Phillips let out a wicked laugh.
“Whatever it takes,” he said, and preceded his friend into the mortuary.
The smile died on his lips as Ryan suddenly remembered DCI Blackett’s house call the previous evening, and the man’s suspicions about his team. If he was to be believed, there were men and women operating in CID without scruples to get what they wanted.
Just as quickly, he shoved the memory aside.
Never in a million years, he told himself.
He would not even think it.
* * *
They found the chief pathologist in excellent spirits.
Jeff Pinter jiggled his bony hips to the Kaiser Chiefs singing about a girl called Ruby while he check
ed the enormous immersion tank on the other side of the room, and waved to them with a begloved hand that dripped God-Only-Knew-What onto the floor.
“Be with you in a minute!” he called out.
The mortuary was quiet that day, with only one other technician in the large, open-plan space, and no cadavers occupied the examination tables lined up in the centre of the room.
“Been a quiet week, has it?” Phillips enquired, shrugging into an over-long visitor’s lab coat that flapped around his ankles.
“Yes, it has,” Pinter replied, washing his hands with surgical soap in a long metal sink at the back of the room. “Apart from the unfortunate gentleman you’re here to see, we’ve only had the usual round of heart attacks and overdoses, as you would expect.”
He dried his hands with a paper towel, then made his way across the room to greet them properly.
“Good morning, to the pair of you,” he said, and beamed a smile so wide they feared it might crack his face.
“You’re full of the joys of summer today,” Ryan said, feeling slightly unnerved. “Had a bit of good news, lately?”
Pinter adjusted his glasses and gave them another dopey smile.
“You might say that. I met a very nice lady recently, and she… well, she decided to stay, last night.”
Both detectives fell back on their training, and worked hard to ensure their faces betrayed none of their surprise. Pinter’s love life had been a work in progress for as long as they could remember, and, frankly, they could hardly imagine the tall, gangly-legged man wooing anybody.
“Howay then, Jeff. Tell us a bit about this wondrous woman. We already know she’s brave, takin’ you on, but what’s she like?”
Phillips’ interest was sufficiently piqued that he almost forgot his surroundings.
Almost.
“Her name is Joanne,” Pinter said. “She’s forty-one, divorced, and has a little boy called Archie, who’s nine. I haven’t met him yet, but we’re planning to take him to the cinema next weekend.”
The other two goggled at him, wondering how their crusty friend would adapt to life as a stepfather, should the occasion arise. Somehow, it was hard to imagine this opera-loving, tweed-wearing doctor of pathology going on camping trips or watching football from the sidelines.
“That’s great, Jeff. Really great,” Ryan said, recovering himself. “So, ah, how did you two meet? Does she know what you do for a living?”
Telling prospective partners that he fished around in dead bodies all day hadn’t always been a successful aphrodisiac for Pinter.
“That’s the best thing about it,” he exclaimed. “Joanne’s a pathologist, too! She’s based down near Richmond, which is a bit of a drive, but we’ll make it work. We met at a convention in Durham, so I didn’t need to tell her I was a personal trainer, or anything like that.”
Again, both men fell back on innate politeness and professional training, to mask their dual expressions of shock at the idea of this bony man working as anything other than a living Reaper.
“Well, it all sounds hunky-dory, mate,” Phillips said. “Just take my advice and don’t wear yourself out. These younger lasses have a lot more energy…”
Ryan pulled a face as his imagination ran wild, again.
“Right. Well, on that delightful note, shall we have a look at Alan Watson?”
Pinter led them through the main mortuary space and down a separate corridor. A number of smaller examination rooms led off it, and he unlocked the one at the end.
“He’s in here,” Pinter said, and paused before entering. “Be prepared—it’s not a pretty sight.”
* * *
The pathologist had not been exaggerating when he’d told them that Alan Watson’s fire-ravaged body was nothing to write home about. Ryan grieved each time he was faced with the shell of what had once been human, a person with thoughts, feelings and a lifetime of memories that made up the fabric of a life. He thought of their families or the loved ones they left behind, and of the pain their passing would bring. Anger usually followed, as he faced the possibility that their death had not been natural and was burdened with the task of bringing justice to those who remained.
In the case of Alan Watson, Ryan remembered all his family had told him about a proud, upstanding man who’d fought for what he believed to be right. He recalled their sadness at the loss of that man, a sadness he suspected had begun long before Alan passed away. For all he’d been a shadow of his former self, nobody deserved to be incinerated in their own home.
Not like that.
“Pinter stands by his preliminary report,” Ryan said, as they made their way back outside into the morning sunshine. “No smoke in the lungs, so it seems clear that Alan died sometime before the fire began.”
Phillips made a murmuring sound of agreement. “He’s less sure about the cause of death,” he said. “Seems fairly certain a heart attack might’ve done it, but a heart attack could’ve been brought on artificially by somebody shoving a cushion over his face.”
Ryan nodded, and was glad there was somebody else in the world who conjured up grim scenarios like that as a matter of course.
All the same, he wondered if the job was making them jump at shadows.
“I don’t know, Frank. There were no defensive wounds that Pinter could find, and we already know that Watson was a late-night drinker and a smoker. The Fire Investigator reckons it was a cigarette that started the blaze, and the toxicology tells its own tale about Alan’s preference for Jamaican rum.”
It all looked like an unfortunate accident.
And yet…
“Something still feels off,” he muttered.
“Maybe it’s all that hocus about ‘The Worm’,” Phillips said. “Puts you on edge, thinking about somebody being that underhand. Could’ve been one of their neighbours, if not Alan himself.”
Ryan gave a half-hearted smile, thinking once more of Blackett’s investigation and wishing he could speak openly without prejudicing it.
He wished he could tell Frank a lot of things.
He forced his mind away from problems close to home, and back to the image of Alan Watson lying there on the metal gurney, his life—and death—laid bare.
“It’s a great leveller, isn’t it, Frank?” Ryan said, as they watched the cars coming and going inside the hospital car park, and heard the distant wail of an ambulance approaching. “It comes to us all, in the end.”
Phillips turned to him with a comical expression on his rounded face.
“What’s brought all this on? Talk about one foot in the grave.”
Ryan huffed out a laugh.
“Must be feeling my age,” he said. “Seems sad to think that, no matter how much we do, no matter how hard we try to live a good life, in the end, it makes no difference.”
Phillips shook his head.
“It makes a lot of difference to the people who’ll remember us, when we’re gone, lad. It means the difference between people talking of what a good man you were, or of how you were wasteful and threw away half your bacon stottie.”
Ryan laughed.
“You’re never going to let me forget that, are you, Frank?”
“Not in this lifetime, pal.”
CHAPTER 13
At Police Headquarters, a light rain had begun to fall, lending the sky a greyish hue that seemed to reflect the general mood of those harboured inside. Melanie Yates had spent much of the previous evening thinking back over the last few days, her treacherous mind dissecting every interaction between herself and Jack to try to pinpoint when things had taken such a drastic turn for the worse. Eventually, she’d fallen into a fitful sleep sometime after midnight and had woken with a throbbing headache and the feeling that she’d suffered uncomfortable dreams all through the night.
For his part, Lowerson looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, which was probably because he hadn’t. Although he’d taken a lot of trouble to make himself presentable, no amount of hair gel or snazzy ties cou
ld disguise the dark circles beneath his eyes that came from nights spent patrolling his own home.
“Morning,” MacKenzie said brightly, making an effort to ignore the lingering atmosphere between the two younger detectives. “I just heard from Ryan. He and Phillips had to pay a visit to the mortuary, but they’ll be back soon.”
“Has there been another murder?” Yates asked, and thought of Rochelle White, who was still missing. “Do they have an ID?”
Lowerson lifted his head, breath lodged somewhere in his throat.
“They’re not sure, yet,” MacKenzie said. “It’s an old man from Penshaw, who got caught in a house fire. They’re trying to work out if it was accidental or not.”
Lowerson lowered his head back to the file on his desk, feeling like every kind of lowlife. The unfortunate body lying on a slab at the mortuary might not have been Rochelle, but it was still worthy of his compassion.
“Ryan wants a progress report on Operation Watchman,” MacKenzie told them. “He and Frank should be back soon. How’re you getting along?”
Lowerson and Yates exchanged an awkward look.
“You go first,” he told her.
“Thanks,” she muttered. “There’s been a setback. Our potential asset was reported missing, yesterday morning—”
“Who’s been reported missing?”
With superlative timing, Ryan and Phillips entered the office at that moment, catching the tail end of Yates’ sentence.
“Morning, sir,” she said, not having broken the habit of formality despite Ryan telling her numerous times to call him by his given name. “I was just saying that we’ve had a setback. The asset I was telling you about at the briefing? She was reported missing, yesterday morning.”
Ryan set his hands on the back of his desk chair.
“Now that her name’s been made public and accessible via Missing Persons, we can dispense with the need for anonymity,” he said. “I presume we’re talking of Rochelle White—Bobby Singh’s girlfriend? What efforts have been made to find her?”
“We wanted to seek your permission to take over this case, and to go ahead and question Bobby Singh on the whereabouts of his girlfriend. They lived together, yet he was not the one to make the report to Missing Persons. We’d like to ask him why.”