by David Hodges
His fingers brushed the back of her hand as she held her glass loosely on the bar top and instinctively her own hand clenched. He didn’t seem to notice, but unwittingly provided her with the opportunity to ask the question that was burning on her lips, when he said, ‘Sure, a pretty girl like yourself hasn’t come here all on her own, has she now?’
She affected a shrug and deliberately glanced behind her into the blaze of spotlights. ‘I wondered if Leroy was here tonight?’ she said.
‘Leroy?’ he echoed and it was plain he hadn’t the faintest idea who she was talking about.
She took a chance, forcing a laugh. ‘Yes, they call him the Spliff. I was hoping he might have something for me.’
Again his expression was blank. ‘Canna help ye there, darlin’,’ he said. ‘But I’m here an’ that could be a quare blessin’ for a lonely lass like you.’
His hand reached across the bar and closed on her wrist. ‘Why don’t you an’ me take a wee dander outside, eh?’
Unable to help herself, despite the circumstances, she tore her wrist free, pitching her glass of whiskey over his hand. ‘Please, no!’ she exclaimed.
His eyes immediately narrowed and his mouth twisted into a vicious scowl. ‘Please, no?’ he threw back at her. ‘Please, no? Y’wee bitch—’
The tall thin man who had suddenly appeared at her elbow interjected with a sharp rebuke. ‘Are you serving here?’ he shouted. ‘I want a double whisky. Famous Grouse.’
The barman glared at him but, under sideways glances from his nearby colleagues, he reluctantly capitulated. Grabbing a glass from under the counter, he turned towards the optics behind him.
‘And another drink for my girl too,’ the new arrival shouted, nudging her with his elbow.
Furnished with the two whiskies, the stranger tossed a twenty pound note on to the counter and turned his back on the barman, leading Kate gently away from the bar to a corner of the room.
Kate raised her glass to her deliverer. ‘Thank you – er—?’ she began, shouting close to his ear.
‘They call me Horse, love,’ he said, raising his glass to hers and shaking his mane of black shoulder-length hair out of his eyes. ‘And you obviously like to live dangerously. That guy had his sights set on you big time.’
She frowned, studying his thin bearded face and sharp dark eyes in the sudden blaze of a spotlight. ‘Why do they call you Horse?’ she queried with a smile.
He grinned, exposing even white teeth. ‘A lady shouldn’t ask that,’ he retorted. ‘It’s all down to assets.’
She started, relieved that the gloom hid her embarrassment. ‘Oh,’ she said with a wry grimace. ‘Sorry.’
He laughed. ‘Don’t be. I’m not.’ He seemed to hesitate. ‘But I couldn’t help overhearing what you said to that Irish git at the bar. How do you know the Spliff?’
‘Er – I don’t.’
‘Then why do you want to see him?’
‘Without being rude, that’s my business.’
‘Looking for a fix, are you?’
She took a chance. ‘Maybe I am.’
He thought for a moment, sipping his drink and leaning over her with one hand supporting him against the wall behind her. ‘What are you on?’
She thought quickly and blurted, ‘Coke.’
He finished his drink and straightened up, setting down his glass on a convenient table. ‘Outside,’ he shouted, nodding towards the entrance doors. ‘We need to talk. Can’t do it in here.’
She hesitated. She didn’t know him from Adam and, once outside the club, she could be at serious risk. On the other hand, though, why was she here? To find Leroy, of course. And this long-haired stranger seemed to be her only chance of doing that.
Draining her own whisky, she dumped her glass beside his and followed him out through the doors, the bouncer and his companion grinning knowingly when they saw the two of them leaving together. ‘Have fun,’ the bouncer said with a chortle which died abruptly when Kate’s escort threw him a hard glance.
The temperature in the car park seemed even colder than before after the heat inside the club and Kate was shivering uncontrollably as she followed Horse to a big white Transit van parked under one of the car park’s security lights. ‘Have a seat,’ he drawled, throwing the front passenger door open and striding around to the driver’s side. This is madness, Kate thought – against all the rules that had been drummed into her – but nevertheless, she found herself climbing up into the van.
The joint was produced almost immediately from the glove compartment but she shook her head in a polite, though firm refusal. ‘I don’t do weed,’ she snapped. ‘It’s crap.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I don’t think you do anything,’ he replied, his tone suddenly grim.
She swallowed hard, trying to avoid the fierce gaze he turned on her and reaching for the door handle. ‘I think I’ll go back inside,’ she said. ‘It’s cold out here.’
The arm that was thrown across her bare midriff as he reached for the door and hauled it shut seemed as hard as seasoned wood. ‘Let’s stop playing games, love, eh?’ he snapped. ‘You’re no more a user than my old mum.’
‘Let me out of here,’ she gasped, struggling futilely as he held the door shut. ‘You have no right—’
‘Right?’ he echoed. ‘I’ve every right.’
And she gaped as he flashed a leather wallet in front of her eyes. The badge on one side and the small card in its plastic sheath on the other were unmistakable in the light from the overhead lamp standard. ‘You’re job?’ she exclaimed.
He withdrew his arm and sat back in his seat, lighting his own joint and filling the car with the sweet nauseating smell of cannabis. ‘Detective Constable Larry Gittings, National Crime Agency, love,’ he said, ‘or should I call you Mistress Plod?’
She shook her head in disbelief and produced her own warrant card. He barely glanced at it. ‘Local Bill, are you then?’ he queried.
‘How the hell did you know?’
He emitted a disparaging laugh. ‘Oh come on, love. I could smell you from the start – and more importantly, so could anyone else.’
‘But – but what—?’
‘Am I doing here?’ He snorted. ‘Well, I was working undercover, if your antics tonight haven’t put paid to that now.’
He turned towards her again and he looked angry. ‘This operation has taken us a year to set up, do you know that? And I was getting so close. Then along comes some swede plod and puts her oar in to foul up the whole thing.’
She swallowed hard. Good on you, girl, she thought. Yet another own goal. You’re doing well at the moment, aren’t you?
‘You could have let us know what was going on,’ she snapped but as soon as she’d said it, she realized how stupid the words must have sounded.
He laughed again. ‘Oh yeah, I could have just waltzed into your nick and had a meeting with everyone: “Hey, guys, my name’s Horse and I’m with the NCA, doing a bit of undercover work at the Sapphire Club. So why don’t you all mosey on down there and have a drink with me some time?” Something like that, eh?’
She clenched her teeth tightly. ‘This isn’t a joke. I’m investigating a possible murder. This guy, Leroy, could be involved.’
He nodded again, stubbing out his cigarette on the dashboard. ‘Well, you can tell me all about it in the morning, ’cause I plan to be in your nick to see your guv’nor first thing. Now get your trim little arse out of my wagon and go home. I think you’ve done enough damage for one night.’
Without warning, he swung on her again and with one movement ripped the front of her top apart. ‘That should make our little tête-à-tête look a bit more kosher, if anyone’s watching, eh?’
‘You bastard!’ she gasped and, scrambling out of his van, sprinted to her own car on the other side of the car park, holding the remnants of her top together with both hands as she ran.
And in the shadows almost within spitting distance of her car, another pair of eyes watched her dri
ve away with a grim smile of satisfaction.
CHAPTER 8
Once again DI Roscoe’s office was clouded with smoke, which ironically was good for Kate this time, despite her objections a few days before, because she was able to sit back a little more unobtrusively in a corner, avoiding the hard gazes cast in her direction by her boss. Having already been up most of the night, engaged in a monumental row with Hayden after she had arrived home with her torn top, Kate looked pale and drawn, her hands tightly locked in her lap.
Roscoe also looked tired but, surprisingly, there was no sign of the anger he had displayed the previous day. In fact, he seemed strangely subdued – his glances in her direction registering bitter disappointment rather than anything else as the lanky long-haired detective from the NCA put his case.
Larry Gittings – or ‘Horse’, as he had called himself – was a lot leaner than he had appeared to Kate at the Sapphire Club and she noted with some surprise the array of tattoos on his bare forearms extending up under the short sleeves of his shirt – even more just visible on his chest through a gap where a button had not been fastened properly. Maybe the NCA didn’t have the same aversion to tattoos being displayed by their officers as provincial police forces, like Avon and Somerset did, she thought ruefully. But there again, undercover officers tended to be laws unto themselves and a few tattoos probably went a long way towards helping someone in his position fit into the high-risk twilight world in which he moved.
Conscious of her gaze on him, Horse threw her a brief glance of his own and she picked up the arrogant smirk in his dark eyes.
‘The fact is,’ Gittings finished, ‘I am an undercover operative and my assignment is part of a major initiative to tackle serious organized crime throughout the UK.’
‘Doing what exactly?’ Roscoe queried.
‘I can’t tell you that. All I can say is that the people I am tracking are members of a major international crime syndicate, which has moved its original base from the Smoke to the sticks and has key links not only to this country but also Europe, the States and the Middle East. Drugs, people trafficking, money laundering, murder – you name it, they are involved in it. The ramifications of a successful undercover operation would be colossal and would eclipse anything we have achieved before.
‘I have managed to penetrate almost to the heart of the organization and I am this close,’ and he made a pincer sign with his finger and thumb, ‘to nailing their Mr Big, so the last thing I need is for some naïve swede plod, like your DS here, to blunder into things and cock everything up.’
‘I am not naïve, I do not blunder into things and I am not a “plod”, Detective Constable,’ Kate almost spat, remembering her ripped top, ‘I am an experienced detective sergeant and I am pursuing a legitimate inquiry into a suspicious death.’
Gittings shrugged, unaffected by her emphasis on the difference between their two ranks. ‘Whatever! The fact remains that your amateurish antics could have resulted in our whole operation being flushed down the toilet.’
‘From what I’ve seen of you,’ Kate threw back, angered by his insulting manner, ‘you’d be perfectly at home down there!’
‘Enough!’ Roscoe rapped. ‘This sort of sniping will get us nowhere.’ He glared at each of them in turn, then stubbed out his cigarette on the edge of the desk and scowled directly at the NCA man. ‘You claim to be an undercover copper. How do we know that? You could be any arsehole.’
Gittings stubbed out his own cigarette (not cannabis this time), reached into the back pocket of his designer threadbare jeans and produced the familiar black leather wallet, which he slammed on to Roscoe’s desk in front of him. ‘What’s that then?’ he said in a tone of pure aggression. ‘Scotch mist?’ The distinctive badge glinted in the sunlight filtering into the room.
‘Watch your lip,’ Roscoe rapped back, picking up the wallet and studying the warrant card in its plastic sleeve, then adding, ‘I’ve never heard of an undercover copper carrying his warrant card on him.’
‘I don’t normally. Most of the time it’s kept elsewhere, but on occasions I need to carry it to prove my bona fides – like now, for example.’
The DI grunted and tossed the wallet unceremoniously into the other’s lap, narrowly avoiding pitching it on to the floor.
Gittings didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘If you want additional verification,’ he said, returning the wallet to his pocket, ‘give the Agency a ring on this number.’ And he coolly leaned on the edge of the desk and wrote down what turned out to be a telephone number and a contact name on the top of a memo pad bearing Roscoe’s elaborate doodles, then sat back with the same arrogant smirk on his face.
For reply, the DI leaned forward, chewing gum slowly, his gaze fixed on the other’s bearded face. ‘You can count on it,’ he said. ‘Now, let me tell you something, Mister. My sergeant here is not an amateur, any more than I am. She is a highly professional and experienced DS and I am a detective inspector, which makes me a senior officer to you, whichever soddin’ squad or agency you belong to. And don’t think you can come into my nick and dictate to me what this department does or does not do on our own manor. We’ll give you breathing space, but only as long as I think it’s necessary. Now piss off out of my nick!’
Gittings had a face on him like thunder as he grabbed his leather jacket from the back of the chair and headed for the door, but Kate’s satisfaction was short-lived. The moment the NCA man had left, the DI turned on her, his eyes still smouldering. ‘As for you, Lewis,’ he snarled, ‘you deliberately disobeyed my instructions, risked your neck again and made us look like the bloody Keystone Cops.’
‘Sorry, Guv,’ Kate said for the second time in twenty-four hours. ‘I just thought—’
‘Thought? Thought?’ the DI all but choked. ‘Don’t think, Lewis, just do as you’re bloody well told! One more slip-up like this and you’ll be back on the street, wearing a funny hat. Got it? Now forget the bloody Sapphire Club business and everything to do with it and stick to the Ellie Landy drowning inquiry.’
‘But there’s a definite link between the two!’ Kate protested, shooting to her feet. ‘The facts speak for themselves.’
Roscoe lurched to his feet. ‘There are no facts, Lewis, only bollocks! Don’t you understand? All this murder thing is in your own imagination and since this investigation started, you’ve gone from one wild theory to another. First, you suggested Ellie Landy could have been stiffed by weirdo, Graham Snell, whom you suspected without any reason of being a sexual pervert, then by Ellie Landy’s old man for revenge; now it’s the boss of some London drugs cartel fingered by the NCA. Where will it all end? You going to put the chief constable’s name in the frame next?’
‘I never suggested Graham Snell or Rod Tolan had stiffed her,’ Kate protested angrily. ‘I just said they were possible suspects if her death turned out not to be accidental. But now I am convinced her death was murder—’
‘A few bruises and torn fingernails don’t add up to murder. We have nothing.’
‘The pathologist seemed to think differently.’
‘The pathologist was putting forward a theory,’ Roscoe said heavily, ‘and that was all. Even she wasn’t prepared to commit herself. I repeat, we have nothing. But what we have got is an ongoing murder investigation in Cheddar, a serial rapist on the rampage in Bridgwater and a multiple stabbing in Wells – all of which have massive resource implications. What the force doesn’t need right now is an accidental drowning elevated to the status of a bloody murder, which will then require yet more resources!’
But Kate stuck to her guns. ‘So what about the name – the Sandman – we found written in the book in her room? Now we know he is a real person and a powerful villain under investigation by NCA. It’s obvious Ellie got too close to him and he had her killed.’
‘OK, maybe she was snooping on his activities – doesn’t prove he had her murdered.’
‘So what about the girl, Polly, I told you about before that arsehole came in to compl
ain? Was she Scotch mist, like that dickhead’s warrant card?’
He ignored her insubordination. ‘You are asking me to take the word of some coke-head junkie?’ he expostulated. ‘She must have seen you coming. It doesn’t take long for word to get out on the street. She probably met the press girl at some stage and when she heard she had snuffed it, made up this cock and bull story to squeeze some cash out of you – succeeded too, didn’t she?’ He took a deep breath. ‘Ellie Landy drowned, do you understand the concept? She fell into the bloody river and drowned. End of!’
‘So you’re cuffing the whole thing?’ she said, suspecting the influence of the DCI behind his decision. ‘Bowing to internal politics and intimidation by Larry Gittings and the NCA?’
‘I’m cuffing nothing,’ Roscoe snarled, ‘and you can get off your high horse, madam, and start doing what you should have been doing from the start – and that is getting out there, finding her missing car and wrapping this thing up, ready for the Coroner’s Inquest. Is that clear enough for you?’
And he opened a thick buff file on his desk and began reading as if she were no longer there.
Angry, frustrated, but left with no other alternative, Kate stormed from the office and slammed the door hard behind her.
There was no one about in the vicinity of the pumping station when Kate drove up the bumpy track half an hour later. Why she had returned to the scene, she didn’t really know herself. She’d just felt a strange inner compulsion to go back again, but once there she was at a loss what to do next.
The blue and white police tapes still fluttered under a faint breeze as she got out of the car and walked down the slope to the water’s edge, starting involuntarily when a grey and white heron staggered skywards from a patch of reeds, panicked by her approach. Crouching on her haunches, she studied the flotsam still jammed into the bank, noting its regular rise and fall under the flow of the water, like the breast of a slate-grey beast whose lungs were constantly being inflated, then deflated by the action of a giant submerged diaphragm.
Straightening up with a shiver, she followed the now ragged curve of the river with her eyes, beyond the pumping station and the adjacent rhyne, until it was swallowed up in the patchwork of flooded fields stretching away into a hazy distance, wondering where on earth Ellie Landy might have gone into the water – and how it could have happened.