MURDER IN THE VILLAGE a gripping crime mystery full of twists

by Faith Martin

  Then Mike Regis was suddenly beside her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Who fired the other shots?’ He could see a gaggle of people crouched on the ground further out in the courtyard, and felt a coldness invade his gut.

  ‘The boss has been shot,’ Janine heard herself say.

  ‘DCI Mallow?’ Regis said sharply.

  Janine felt her head shake. ‘No, my boss. DI Greene.’

  Now, they were all grouped around the figure lying so still on the ground, and Janine didn’t know what to do. Tommy seemed to be coping with the first aid — he’d been the last to do a refresher course, so she left him to it. Mel was knelt down at Hillary’s head, talking to her, but she didn’t seem to be responding. Her eyes were closed. Was she dead? Janine tried to see where the wound was, but Tommy was blocking her view. His hands seemed to be pressing down on her lower stomach. A gut wound? Janine began to shiver. Those were bad. Really bad. She didn’t want to think how bad those could be.

  She looked around and saw DI Regis, standing stiff and white, staring at the woman on the floor. His eerily silent sergeant, Tanner, stood beside him. Members of the TFI were standing around, guns ready, waiting and watching everything and everyone. Suddenly, the flashing blue lights of the ambulance came around the corner, and Regis raced off towards it, no doubt to direct them to Hillary as quickly as possible.

  Janine sat down. She didn’t care that the cobbles were hard and cold and dirty. She just needed to sit down.

  * * *

  Hillary became aware of movement, of different voices, of being lifted. She suddenly felt warmer. Her whole world began to shift — faster, smoother, and it took her a while to realise she was in the back of an ambulance.

  OK. That was probably good too.

  She went back to sleep.

  * * *

  When she woke up, her mother’s face appeared above her, and she jumped. ‘Mum?’ she mumbled, wondering what she was doing waking up in her bed back in her old childhood home. It wasn’t Mother’s Day, was it? She often spent the weekend at her mum’s then.

  ‘How’s the wounded hero then?’ a gruff masculine voice said, and suddenly her favourite uncle was there too.

  ‘Uncle Max?’ she said, frowning. What was going on? ‘Nothing’s happened to the boat, has it?’ It was the first thing she could think of. Technically, the Mollern still belonged to Max, although she’d come to think of it as her own.

  ‘The Mollern’s fine. I’ve kept an eye on it, made sure it was all battened down,’ he said. He was a small man, neat and tidy, who looked as if he should have been a retired military man. In fact, he’d worked for the Post Office for most of his adult life.

  ‘How are you feeling, love?’ her mother asked, reaching out and taking her hand. It was then that Hillary noticed all the white — white walls, white ceiling, white sheets. Other beds — three of them. Nurses in white. Oh God. She was in hospital.

  Then it came back — the gunfire. The man rushing out in the night, lifting the gun. She and Mel in direct line of fire. The sudden pain.

  ‘Bugger, I got shot,’ she said flatly.

  Max Granger gave a sudden grin, and hugged his younger sister. ‘See, told you, June,’ he said, giving her grey curls a quick kiss. ‘Nothing wrong with your girl a few days’ rest won’t cure.’

  Hillary reached for her mother’s hand. She looked older than she remembered, greyer, smaller. ‘Oh, Mum,’ Hillary said helplessly. ‘Please, don’t worry.’ But her daughter had been shot. Of course she was worried. Hillary felt a great wave of guilt wash over her for all that her mother must have gone through. In her mind’s eye, she could see it all, how it must have been.

  Mel would have been the one to tell her, of course. He’d have driven, not phoned. The moment she’d seen her daughter’s superior officer on the doorstep, June Thorpe would have known that it was bad. Had she had nightmares about this very scenario? Mel would have told her quickly and calmly what had happened. Had he driven her back to the hospital? Had she stayed all night?

  Again, guilt nibbled at her. She shouldn’t be putting her mother through this. She was in her mid-seventies now, too old to take such traumas in her stride. And somewhere at the back of her head a little voice piped up, telling her that if she took early retirement, June Throrpe would never have to worry again. Hastily, she thrust it back, and glanced at the pale grey blinds lining the window. It was broad daylight. She was assuming it was the next day — but what if it was the day after that? Suddenly she felt utterly disorientated.

  ‘Did I have to have surgery?’ she asked, and her mother sighed and slowly sank back on to the chair. It was wonderful to hear her girl speak again. To sound so like her old self — calm and in charge. That was her Hillary. Always the sensible one. Always the one who knew what she wanted and how to get it.

  ‘Yes, they had to remove the bullet.’ Her words quavered a bit on the last word. ‘But there was no real damage. It came close to a major artery though,’ June carried on quickly, as if needing to gloss over that bit, ‘but there was no real muscle or bone damage. Apparently the bullet lodged in the fatty tissue.’

  Hillary began to shift to her side, the better to see her mother’s face and tell her that she didn’t have to worry, the shooting had been a one-in-one-thousand glitch, then bit the words off as a sudden pain shot through her backside.

  Her backside! Lodged in the fatty tissue? ‘Oh no,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t tell me I was shot in the bum!’

  ‘Ssshh,’ June Thorpe said, casting an anxious glance at the other three women in the beds around her. ‘No, you were shot just above the hip — through the waist, more or less.’

  Hillary closed her eyes and grinned in sheer relief. She would never have lived it down if she’d been shot in the backside. She could already imagine the jokes the desk sergeant would have had lined up. Not to mention what that sneering git Frank Ross would have said. To have Ross, of all people, laughing at her, would have been simply too much.

  * * *

  Hillary wasn’t quite awake later on that evening, when Mel arrived. They’d served tea — or what had passed for it — and she’d taken so many pills she was almost sure she could hear herself rattle. The drone of the television sets that her fellow patients were watching acted as a soporific, but a stealthy screech had her eyes popping open. Mel was positioning a chair beside the bed, and had caught the chair leg against the tiled floor.

  He looked up and winced as he saw Hillary’s big brown eyes looking at him. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.’

  Hillary smiled. ‘No problems. So what the hell happened?’

  Mel sat down and grimaced. ‘Hell, Hill, you’ve been shot. The least you can do is moan and gripe a bit before giving me the third degree.’

  He was once more the immaculate ‘Mellow’ Mallow, well-dressed, and looking like something out of a Brooks Brothers catalogue. His first marriage had quickly faded because they’d both been too young, and his second marriage to a very wealthy woman had also ended amicably enough. It wasn’t hard to see how Mel would never have any trouble attracting the ladies. He’d also earned his ‘Mellow’ tag with a soft voice and apparently easy-going personality that hid a will of steel.

  ‘Fine,’ Hillary sighed. ‘The dinner was so bad, it made me feel as if I was a cordon bleu chef in comparison. My hip hurts, they keep making me take drugs that bring on the DTs and the bed is as hard as iron. Happy now?’

  Mel grinned. ‘Much better.’

  ‘OK, now what the hell happened? Did Raleigh jump the gun?’

  Mel shook his head. His face looked more gaunt than she remembered it, and for the first time ever she thought he could do with a shave. Hell, he must be having a rough day. ‘I’ll say,’ he confirmed wryly. ‘We should never have been in that courtyard. Shit, Hill, when I saw you go down, when I realised you were hit . . . hell, I’ve never felt so sick in all my life.’

  Hillary went hot, then cold. She hadn’t really thought about tha
t yet. She grunted, and said, ‘Give us a hand sitting upright, would you? There’s a lever thingy under the bed — push it in. Or out. It makes the back of the bed come forward.’

  Mel, successfully distracted, fiddled with it, the bed first going down, then up. Wincing with pain, Hillary finally got herself sitting more or less upright and comfortable. Her hip throbbed. ‘Bring us another pillow behind my head. Thanks. Right, now tell me. What’s the state of play? Were there drugs? Was Fletcher there? Did we nail the bastard at last?’

  ‘Fletcher’s dead,’ Mel said flatly, and Hillary blinked. So that was it. Just like that, the big bad bogeyman had been dispensed with. Somehow, it didn’t seem real.

  ‘Was the shooting righteous?’ she asked automatically, although why she asked, she couldn’t say. Any shooting by the TFI was almost always righteous.

  To her astonishment, however, Mel shrugged and spread his hands. ‘We don’t know. As far as we can tell, he was shot by one of his own men.’

  Hillary blinked again. She felt her chest tighten — not, she was sure, due to anything medical, but with a tension she’d felt before. A tension she always felt when anything was somehow off. ‘Come again?’ she said slowly, and listened as Mel told her what they had worked out from the evidence gathered and the witness statements taken during the day.

  ‘It started off great. The outer perimeter sweep went without a hitch,’ Mel began. ‘Then they raided the house. So far, so good. The TFI went through, room by room, in a classic sweep, but in the first bedroom encountered resistance.’

  ‘The first bout of gunfire we heard, when we were driving to Checkpoint Charlie?’

  ‘Right,’ Mel confirmed. ‘They mopped that up — one of Fletcher’s gang was hit, and killed. They surrendered pretty quickly after that. Then another member of the TFI came under fire, this time from one of the Liverpool gang. They returned fire, and quickly persuaded the Scouser to surrender. The drugs were there all right, but at that point there was still no sign of Fletcher.’

  Hillary frowned. How had Fletcher managed to hide himself when none of the others had? Then she shrugged. The farm was Fletcher’s home ground — he’d obviously have had a few good bolt-holes mapped out beforehand, in case he needed them. He’d always been a careful bastard — that’s why they’d never managed to catch the slippery sod.

  ‘The TFI were doing a more detailed sweep through the house when we rolled up,’ Mel went on, and Hillary frowned, holding a hand up to stop him.

  ‘The team leader hadn’t given Raleigh the all-clear?’ she asked, eyebrows raised.

  ‘No,’ Mel sighed. ‘That’s why one of his men stopped us at the door, and called the team leader down. Raleigh insisted on going inside. He checked out the upper rooms, according to one of the TFI sergeants, but when they came up empty, went back downstairs. He and Frank Ross went into one of the rooms off the kitchen that had already been cleared. The team leader took point again, and went back upstairs, where the rest of the team was still doing its second, more thorough search. After about a minute, there was another burst of gunfire, and this is where things start to get cloudy.’

  Hillary tried to put the memory of that moment out of her mind. What came immediately afterwards wasn’t something she wanted to deal with just yet.

  ‘Go on, what happened?’ She was still struggling to make sense of all this. Why had Raleigh wanted to go in so early? What difference did twenty minutes make?

  Mel laughed. ‘You might well ask! Just what did happen next? We’re not really sure. Any of us. Even now, and we’ve been going over and over it all day. Apparently, Fletcher had a hidey hole in a cupboard out in the back wall of the kitchen. Raleigh and Ross had gone back downstairs by then, but they were in one of the living rooms — the right parlour, we’ve called it, just to save confusion. They heard gunfire in the kitchen next to them, but saw nobody. When the team leader and his immediate team came downstairs, they found Fletcher dead on the kitchen floor. Then they heard gunfire outside. The first one out the door nailed the bastard who shot you. Oh yeah, Janine was in the left lounge, and Regis and that sergeant of his were upstairs. Nobody saw Fletcher get it, so nobody knows what really went down. At the moment, we’re working on the theory that Fletcher and one of his thugs had holed up in the kitchen, but argued about whether to stay put and trust that their hiding place would remain undetected, or try to make a break for it.’

  Hillary frowned. ‘Staying put wouldn’t be a good idea. Fletcher would know that the cops would be at the farmhouse for days, logging evidence.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Perhaps he wanted to leg it, but his sidekick got scared and wanted to stay. So he shot Fletcher when Fletcher insisted on making a run for it.’

  Hillary gave Mel a quick look. ‘That make sense to you?’

  ‘Nope. Janine said, when she was in the left lounge, that she thought she saw someone slip out of the door opposite. If that’s true, it could have been the one who shot you. But Raleigh and Ross were in there, and they’re both saying that nobody came through the kitchen via the right lounge.’

  ‘So whoever it was must have come from the kitchen and straight up the corridor and Janine saw him pass as he went across the open doorway?’

  ‘She must have.’ Mel shrugged helplessly.

  ‘Could Janine have seen the super slipping out of the room opposite, trying to see where the shooting was coming from? Did he go into the kitchen?’

  ‘Yeah, he did. The team leader found both Raleigh and Ross there. So, perhaps that’s it. Janine doesn’t really know who she saw — she only sensed movement. Hell, Hill, it’s all a bit of a mess. Regis, Tanner and Janine shouldn’t have been in there at all. The TFI are up in arms about it, and who can blame them? The team leader is telling all and sundry that he’s not going to take the rap for this. But when they heard gunfire they all piled in. Regis and Tanner headed straight for the stairs and only got to the top just in time to get out of the way as the rest of the TFI came racing down! It must have been like an episode out of the Keystone Cops in there.’

  Hillary opened her mouth to defend Regis, then shut it again. She understood why he’d gone racing inside, of course. But Mel was right. It had been stupid. Brave, but stupid. ‘So how are the brass playing this?’ she asked curiously, and Mel laughed cynically.

  ‘The drugs haul was big, and seeing as it’s a new concoction, it has the appeal of being novel. Fletcher is dead — so a “force for evil” has been removed from our streets, according to the assistant CC. As you can imagine, the PR boys are having a field day. They’ve even got a hero cop to put a cherry on the icing.’

  ‘Aye? Who?’ Hillary asked blankly, then felt herself flush as Mel gave her a long, level look.

  ‘Oh,’ Hillary said.

  ‘I put your name forward for the gallantry medal,’ Mel said quietly. ‘Marcus Donleavy backed it. You’re bound to get it. You saved my life, Hill,’ he muttered, looking down at his hands. ‘I just stood there like a lemon.’

  Hillary looked quickly away, and found the woman in the bed opposite watching her. She was the young one, who’d come in yesterday with appendicitis. She quickly dipped her head to her magazine, pretending she hadn’t been straining her ears to listen in.

  ‘A man came at me with a gun and I hit the dirt,’ Hillary said dismissively. ‘What the hell’s so gallant about that?’

  Mel leaned back in the chair and ran a tired hand over his face. Hillary supposed he hadn’t slept at all last night. ‘Come on, Hill, we all know that you were thinking on your feet, as always. You stopped me and Tommy from going in and making the farce even worse. And you knew exactly what Brian Conroy wanted when he came out that door, waving that bloody revolver around. He was making for one of the cars, wasn’t he?’

  ‘It seemed obvious,’ Hillary agreed. So that was the name of the man who’d shot her. Brian Conroy.

  ‘Sure, it was obvious,’ Mel echoed wryly. ‘All the other vehicles were too inaccessible. I thought of it about five m
inutes later, when we were following you in the ambulance. Let’s not kid ourselves, Hill, I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you.’

  Hillary saw Mary, the woman in the bed next to her own, glance across. She was about her own age, and had come in to have her cancerous ovaries removed. They’d chatted that afternoon, when Mary had told her that, since she already had three kids, it was no big deal.

  Mary had clearly heard Mel say that she’d saved his life, but for some reason, Hillary found herself unable to meet the other woman’s look. No doubt it was admiring, maybe even respectful. And in this day and age, with tales of heroism being too precious and far between to be ignored, Hillary supposed she should just accept the compliment and then forget about it.

  The trouble was, she felt such a complete fraud. OK, so maybe she’d thought a bit faster than everybody else, and had managed to keep a clear head when everybody around her had been losing theirs, to paraphrase Kipling. And she’d been unlucky enough to get shot in the arse. Well, nearly. But did that make her a hero?

  Her mind skipped forward to a possible awards ceremony. The press would be out in force, with her mother and brother and sisters and Uncle Max all there to cheer her on and slap her on the back. She’d have to step up on to some sort of stage and shake hands with the chief constable as he handed her a bit of metal. Then she’d have to have her picture taken over and over again, followed by interviews with the press, where she’d give modest disclaimers and refuse to comment about the ongoing Fletcher investigation.

  She’d have to wear her best dress uniform, of course. Hell, did it even still fit her? She’d have to have it let out. At this, Hillary suddenly laughed out loud. ‘Hey, Mel, did I tell you, the bullet didn’t do any serious damage because my fat stopped it? If ever there was a good excuse not to diet, that’s gotta be it.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her third roommate smile. She was a plump, middle-aged librarian, who was having her gall bladder removed tomorrow.

  ‘Trust you to find a silver lining,’ Mel laughed.