Gatecrasher

by Robert Young

  Campbell felt the surprise before the reassurance. He wasn't expecting that. No hard questions? No cuffs? He smiled philosophically and nodded. 'I suppose so. What about this lot?'

  'You could come down the station, make a formal report. We'd get the burglary looked into, you'd eventually get a crime number to give to the insurance company? ' He glanced knowingly at Constable Scott. 'Or you could just buy yourself a new DVD player and a burglar alarm.'

  Campbell smiled and tried to contain his relief, seeing the two men to the door. As he closed it behind them he could hear the words 'Bloody mess', but he didn't think they were talking about the remnants of the break-in.

  11

  Monday. 2pm.

  'Drennan.'

  Matthew Drennan slid the phone between chin and shoulder and put down his coffee mug. The call was short and Drennan barely said a word, just grunted his responses.

  He finished the conversation and ended the call before looking up a number from the contact list in his computer. He punched the number into the phone and plucked the receiver from the cradle.

  'It's me. No sign of anything inside the place sir but they found blood in the garden and on the wall. Looks like he jumped over and maybe cut through to the other street or jumped over into another garden.

  'They said there was nothing in the flat but that there was blood on the door handle. Probably tried to get in but found it locked. They gave it a good going over but it was this morning and they didn't want to hang around in there too long. Looks as if we still have a loose end. I'm on it.'

  After a half dozen more calls Drennan got someone in the Charing Cross A and E who let slip that they had someone come in Saturday night a serious neck wound.

  That's our Tony, he thought to himself. What's that, a mile or so from Fulham? Got to be him.

  'Unfortunately we have no idea who he was because he had no ID on him and he didn't regain consciousness.' A pause then. 'Died on Sunday.'

  Drennan smiled a ghoulish smile.

  So no loose end then, thought Drennan. All done. He vanishes and nobody knows how or why. No trail.

  The voice at the other end coughed, perhaps to break the silence.

  'OK,' said Drennan. 'Thanks anyway.'

  'And the man that brought him in said he didn't know him either.'

  Drennan was about to hang the phone up, froze.

  'Say that again,' he said. 'I didn't catch that.'

  'The young man who came in with him. He didn't know the man. Said he'd gatecrashed his party.'

  Drennan dropped the phone and stared into space.

  'I'll say.'

  12

  Monday. 4pm.

  Campbell looked at his watch and noted with dismay that there was still a couple of hours before he could get out of the office.

  Not that he'd really done anything of note so far. Having set about tidying up his flat for a second time in as many days it had taken the best part of two hours and another hour to get in to work.

  Since arriving his time had been spent talking with colleagues about the weekend and the subsequent burglary, staring blankly at his screen, reading through various articles and reports without taking in a single thing and emailing his friends about his awful last few days.

  The hangover that had dogged him throughout Sunday had still not cleared entirely and he had been unable to sleep properly worrying about the implications of the death of his gatecrasher.

  He had trawled through various news sites on the internet but had found nothing about the incident; not that he'd expected to but it killed half an hour so the effort was not a total waste. He had emailed some of his friends about the party but none of them had seen anything more than he had and most just wanted to know what had happened and Campbell found their curiosity morbid and unsettling and gave only brief responses to their breathless enquiries. It kept his mood low and ensured that his mind kept returning to the sketchy memories of that night.

  Volunteering to make drinks for his colleagues Campbell returned to his desk and resolved to get some work done for the remainder of the day before somebody said something to him about his lack of productivity. He would knuckle down and the time would pass quicker and then he could get out of here.

  But in half an hour Campbell was back into the same rut that he'd been stuck in only now the tiredness was much worse and his eyes felt as sore as his head. His mind was wandering again, turning back to the slideshow of memories of the party, his stomach turning as he remembered the drinking.

  Hanging his head and closing his eyes Campbell tried to clear his thoughts and turn back to work but suddenly he was seeing the man lying on his kitchen floor again. He could hear people shuffling out of his home on the other side of the closed kitchen door, the shallow breathing of the man next to him, the ambulance announcing its approach.

  He was looking down at the man, at his blood. He was trying to focus but his eyes seemed unable to stay trained on the same point for any length of time. Then the head rose unsteadily from the floor and Campbell's heart beat pounded yet faster as the panic and alcohol did their work. The man's head was turning slightly toward Campbell.

  'Stiff and cold.' he said.

  Stiff and cold.

  13

  Monday. 4pm.

  Drennan introduces himself and gives his credentials which seems enough to convince the voice at the other end.

  'How can I help?'

  'I understand you have a bit of a mystery caller down there. A very cold one.' The line went quiet and Drennan prompted irritably. 'Saturday night.'

  'Nobby-no-mates from Fulham? You heard about that?'

  'I did.' A pause. 'Who's dealing with it? You?'

  'I got landed with it, yes.'

  'Listen; don't break your back trying to find out who it is.'

  'Do what?'

  'Let's just say that it won't reflect poorly on you should your enquiries not lead to any firm conclusions. He was a scumbag. You don't need to waste your time and resources. You're a busy man. Lots of other things to do.'

  Silence.

  'You do understand me?'

  'I'm not sure I want to, but I'm not sure I can help you.'

  'You don't need to do anything,' Drennan said as if he thought that perhaps the other man was stupid. 'This case is no longer in your in tray.'

  'I mean, I already know. Things have, uh, developed.'

  'Developed how?'

  'Found his wallet. We already know who he is. You want to tell me what the this is about?'

  The question was ignored.

  'Well you want to know who he is exactly?? No. No I suppose you already know that. Otherwise you wouldn't be on the phone asking me to pretend he's nobody.'

  'No I don't suppose I would. Who knows?'

  'Just me and DC Samuel. We're already checking his records and looking for known associates.'

  'Congratulations. Where was the wallet?'

  'He gatecrashed some house party in Fulham. Pissed as a fart after the Chelsea game. Anyway, seems he had an accident with a wine glass and managed to impale himself on the thing falling over in this guy's kitchen. Wallet was in the garden. Dropped it climbing over the wall.'

  'Address?'

  Another pause, longer this time. Apprehensive.

  'It's just some nobody. Some bloke having a party - never knew the guy, never seen him before.'

  'Address.' Firmer, impatient.

  'Look, I've spoken to him, he doesn't know a thing. He got burgled while he was in giving his statement!'

  'Burgled? That is bad luck isn't it?'

  14

  Monday. 6.30pm.

  'Ladies and gentlemen, the controller has just told me that there is a signalling problem up ahead and we are in a queue so it might be a few minutes before we get into Hammersmith station. I do apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you and thank you for your patience.'

  Hammersmith. Campbell was surprised to discover that he was nearly at his stop. He had lo
st track of where he was as the train passed through station after station and he had sat staring absently into space. Stiff and cold.

  People around him groaned and shook their heads but nobody said anything and some people even smiled a here-we-go-again sort of smile. Just another tube ride.

  Campbell rolled his head back onto his shoulders and tried to grind out some of the tension in his neck. The afternoon in the office had dragged even more after that flash of memory had come stumbling in on his consciousness and nobody had complained when he up and left a little earlier than everyone else. Most people knew about the party - some of his colleagues had even been there - and about the burglary that morning. More than one person had remarked that they were surprised that he'd come in at all but Campbell knew that he had to escape the flat.

  As he closed his eyes the driver came over the speaker to advise that they would be moving into Hammersmith station shortly and repeated his apology. Campbell saw the same image again, the same instant replay of that blood-matted head lifting itself up slowly and uncertainly and the words: stiff and cold. He was sure that was what it was. He thought that he had then told the man not to worry about being stiff and cold, that the ambulance was coming. But he couldn't be certain what he'd said exactly. In that state it wouldn't have sounded much like anything.

  The train jerked to a halt and the doors hissed open and Campbell swung himself up and out of the seat and through the doors. It was getting dark now and chilly too. People were wearing long heavy clothes again and holiday tans had faded pale.

  Up the escalators he worked his way out to his bus stop and stepped out of the doors to join the queue. It always seemed to be a strange bunch here, perhaps because the bus stopped outside the Charing Cross hospital down along the Fulham Palace Road and Hospitals often attracted the oddballs. He knew all about that.

  As one bus pulled up he surrendered quickly to the swarm of people that surged for the door and realised that he would be lucky to get on this one, let alone find a seat so he hung back and let the crowd fight amongst themselves. Two minutes later his patience was rewarded as another bus swung around the corner to sweep up the small group of people that had been unable or unwilling to squeeze themselves onto the previous one.

  Touching his oyster card against the card-reader Campbell moved along the aisle to the rear toward a seat where he saw a discarded newspaper which he picked up for something to read for the ten minutes or so it would take before his stop. To his mild disappointment it was a local, not a national paper, but he flipped it reflexively to the sports pages which carried a couple of stories about Fulham Football Club so he skimmed through them and then turned it over to read from the front.

  There was nothing of interest for Campbell as flipped the front page over and then skimmed past the headlines: something about house prices, something about a spate of muggings near the Hammersmith underground station. Both of which he could well believe and the thought occurred to him that perhaps there might have been some connection and police searching for leads on the latter should look up some local estate agents since Campbell certainly felt as if he'd been mugged when he bought his flat. He smiled, amused at himself and flipped again. Something in a smaller side column caught his eye. The headline read: Break-in at Griffin Holdings.

  Campbell stared into space for a minute, sure that it meant something.

  Griffin Holdings. Did a friend work there? No, that wasn't it. They heard so many company names at work when analysing stocks, perhaps that's where he'd heard it before? Perhaps, but he didn't think so. Griffin Holdings.

  Why did it sound familiar? Campbell started to read the article and then stopped again as it hit him.

  Stiff and cold. That's not what the man had said.

  15

  Monday. 7pm.

  It was raining now and the wet road reflected the glare of lights from shops and traffic alike. Campbell hardly noticed though. His mind had gone into high gear now and his head ached. A thousand, million thoughts flashed at him as he walked, about the gatecrasher and what he'd said. About what he'd read in the paper, the break-in. Were the two linked? Was he being paranoid? Surely that was just a coincidence. Surely.

  He shook his head.

  Stiff and cold.

  Griffin Holdings.

  He knew that he must have been saying stiff and cold. He was bleeding heavily, apparently drunk, looked a mess. Maybe he'd been outside for a while in a chill autumn night. Of course he'd be stiff and cold. At the very least.

  But he also knew, with absolute certainty, that wasn't what he'd said at all. Somewhere through the alcohol fogged memory a flash of recall and a dash of logic had filled in the blanks, incorrectly. But as soon as he had read the words in the paper the memory had returned, clear and unambiguous. 'Griffin Holdings,' the man had said.

  There was no question about that and the more Campbell tried to talk himself out of it, to convince himself that he had heard 'stiff and cold', the more certain he became that he hadn't.

  He ducked into a large convenience store and toured his way past the freezer cabinet. Picking up a frozen Lasagne he headed for the till and asked for 'anything with Ibuprofen'.

  Half an hour later he was changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and stood barefoot in the kitchen trying to peer though the darkened glass of the oven door where the lasagne bubbled away gently. It looked reasonably edible despite his reservations about frozen food. Anything would do right now, anything with a minimum of effort.

  As he waited he heard those forced, weak words echoing over and over again. He struggled against his eager imagination, which kept conjuring extraordinary scenes featuring the gatecrasher and the break-in at Griffin Holdings the week before; on the run from police, hopping his garden wall in his desperation to escape. Or a witness to the break in, terrified and taking refuge in his home and finding only tragedy? the wound in his throat nothing to do with the glass at all?the burglary of Monday morning nothing to do with cash or Campbell's DVD player.

  Marching into his living room Campbell began rifling through the menu on his MP3 player pausing at some aggressive, bass heavy hip hop and then selected some noisy rock and turned the volume up. He needed to distract himself. He needed to drown out his wandering thoughts.

  He couldn't.

  Campbell felt tired, strung out. Spread thin. He knew that he looked it too, his face looked pallid, the skin almost grey but dark ringed around the eyes. He paced the room as the guitars roared over thudding bass and drums, closing his eyes he tried to listen to the chords, the words but he could hear nothing except that dying man's weak voice saying it over and over again. Griffin Holdings.

  He was telling me something. He was trying to pass me something before he died. Oh God! He knew he was dying. As he lay there in a strange room next to some drunken stranger he must have realised that he was going to die.

  Campbell clamped hands over his eyes, pressed against them as if he could push everything out. He tried not to think about how the man must have felt lying there cold and frightened and faced with the reality of his own mortality, that he had found his end. Who was he? Where had he come from and what had he left behind?

  He couldn't imagine the anguish of those final moments, whether the realisation would have been attended by great fear or great calm, by panic or acceptance. Weak and shivering in a spreading pool of his own blood in a place he didn't know, had the man felt any sort of gratitude to Campbell that he did not spend those fading moments completely alone? That there had at least been somebody there to help him, to try at least to save him. What a shock to have met such a shocking and sudden end. That such a terrible and painful accident could so swiftly have robbed someone of a husband, a brother, a son, defied logic and understanding. Campbell had a brother. He too had loving parents that would be shattered to wake one morning to find that their eldest son had suffered a fatal wound whilst out drinking and trying to have fun one night. Just gone one day forever.

  And what now would
become of him? The police seemed satisfied that it was an accident, a coincidence. They seemed to see nothing overly suspicious in what had happened, even considering the burglary. Why not? Campbell wasn't so sure. Especially so since he knew something they didn't. Should he tell them? This man had said those words to him as the last thing that he could do. Had he been telling Campbell something more? Perhaps the man had been involved in the break in at Griffin Holdings that Campbell had read about and perhaps that was more sinister and significant than anything the newspaper report had indicated. Perhaps this man had been killed for what he knew. After all, had anyone seen the accident happen? Nobody had admitted to it.

  What more to this situation was there to discover? Campbell wondered how he would ever find out what with the state of his memory of that night.

  The music stopped abruptly and snapped Campbell from his train of thought. Maybe that was it. Maybe he shouldn't trust his shaky memory anyway. Perhaps, after all the fretting and the paranoia, he had in fact heard 'Stiff and cold' and was just blowing everything out of proportion. Making connections where none existed.

  Glancing at his watch he saw that he had a few minutes before the food would be ready so he and turned on the TV and his home cinema equipment.

  That finished, he trotted back through to the kitchen and pulled open the oven door. He scooped the foil tray off the shelf in the oven with a dishcloth over his hands and swung round to slide it onto the worktop as he kicked the oven door shut behind him with his heel.

  Slipping a plate underneath the lasagne he tugged the dishcloth away from under it but as he did this, a thread caught on the crimped edge of the foil tray and Campbell could only watch helpless as his dinner slipped back off the pate, flipped in the air and spread itself across his kitchen floor.