Grief Encounters

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘Have you been to bed with her yet?’ Fiona asked with a giggle.

  ‘Good God, no,’ he replied.

  ‘Well I would have thought that would be your first objective. Don’t you think so, Trist? It has a certain poetic justice. Getting one’s own back, and all that. It was people like her that blighted our lives right from the beginning, so do unto others as they did unto you. You should give her one, Richard, and think of England while you do it.’

  ‘I’ll consider it,’ he replied, ‘but how do you think we should hang her out to dry?’

  ‘What have you come up with?’ Tristan asked. ‘You must have thought about it.’

  ‘Mmm, a little. Are we going to Cannes again in September?’

  ‘We’d better be,’ Teri asserted.

  ‘OK. Good. I was wondering about inviting her down for a couple of days. We could put her in the apartment. I’d take her out on the yacht and we’d do some topless sunbathing. You could take pictures, Tristan, with a long lens. I reckon the redtops would be interested in them.’

  Tristan thought about it, then said: ‘That would be embarrassing, but it’s not a disgrace.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ Wentbridge agreed. ‘I’d have to be in there, too. The married man. That might do it.’

  ‘And where am I while you’re cavorting with Miss Wonderful?’ Teri demanded. ‘And what if she refused to take her shirt off and show her boobs? I think it’s a daft idea.’

  ‘OK,’ her husband replied. ‘You think of something better.’

  ‘A hotel room,’ she stated. ‘Good old-fashioned divorce photos. You and her in bed, or better still, on the bed. Tristan does the private detective bit, with the camera. Bang, flash, Bob’s your uncle, send them to the tabloids.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ he reluctantly agreed.

  Tristan said: ‘How would you lure her into a hotel? We all have perfectly suitable houses.’ After a silence he continued: ‘Do women download pornography? Are there female paedophiles?’

  ‘There could always be a first time,’ Wentbridge replied.

  ‘No, we’ve done that,’ Teri objected. ‘Let’s try to be original.’

  ‘Yeah, Teri’s right,’ Tristan said. ‘If we stick to the same formula someone will rumble us. And it’s too easy and impersonal. Ideally, we’d be there to see the expression on her face as her world turned to ratshit. We need a new approach.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ declared Fiona, and the other three turned to face her. ‘Drink driving. Richard gets her drunk one night, when she’s in her car. The police breathalyse her, she gets banned, end of a beautiful career, lots of broken-hearted kiddy-winkies. Serve the bitch right.’

  ‘She only had an orange juice, Tuesday evening.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to work at it, won’t you?’

  Technology has made us all change the way we work. Sometimes the changes were evolutionary, at others they were violent U-turns that hurled established practices into the hedgerow and caused new ideas to be taken on board with unseemly haste. For three hundred years clocks and watches relied on springs, cogs and balance wheels to keep them accurate, but in the space of a couple of decades these were replaced by vibrating crystals, digital displays and atomic accuracy. Almost overnight the mobile phone has created a world where it is theoretically possible for everyone in it to talk to everyone else in it. And then there are computers…

  Thieving cars has evolved alongside everything else. A handful of years ago it was a brick through the side window, smash the steering lock with the same brick, short circuit two wires and you were away. It was upsetting and inconvenient for the car owner, but nobody was hurt.

  The car manufacturers have done their bit to improve things, fitting immobilisers and alarms, remote control locks and even keyless systems that unlock the door and switch on the ignition as the rightful owner approaches the vehicle and slides into the driver’s seat, which has automatically adjusted itself to accommodate him.

  The brick through the window no longer works. Now, before you can steal a car you have to steal the keys. Searching for a brick has been replaced by an act of burglary or robbery. Sometimes it is as simple as fishing through a letterbox to hook the key for the desirable 4x4 standing in the driveway; sometimes it involves kicking the door down and terrifying the woman and her children cowering in the house. In the league table of violence, car theft has moved up into the play-off zone.

  Next to his wife and daughter, Jimmy Johnson’s Subaru Impreza was his pride and joy. It was the WRX model, but he’d equipped it with Speedline wheels and Milltek exhaust, and polished it until it glowed. Jimmy was a self-employed CORGI gas fitter, and was regularly on standby through the night for any reported gas leaks or heating failures. Thursday evening he’d put his daughter to bed and read her a story, then settled down with his wife to watch Big Brother on TV. When the phone rang he knew it was a call-out and leapt to answer it with undisguised eagerness.

  Five minutes later he had reversed his work van out of his driveway and sped off towards a reported gas leak. Five more minutes later Mrs Johnson, her wide-awake young daughter resting on her hip, answered a ring of the doorbell. It had been a sunny day and was still broad daylight. The birds were singing and someone not far away was having a barbeque.

  As the door swung open Mrs Johnson was knocked back into the room by a burly man who was pulling a stocking mask down over his face. She screamed and clutched the child closer to her. There were two of them, carrying steel jemmies that they used to smash a glass fruit bowl and attack the crockery on the table in a deliberate show of violence.

  ‘Don’t hurt us! Please don’t hurt us!’ Mrs Johnson pleaded. She fell gasping to the floor, her face growing pale as she fought to force the air out of her lungs, her arms protectively enveloping her daughter.

  ‘Where are the keys?’ one of the men shouted into her face, his voice blunted by the mask. ‘To the car.’

  Mrs Johnson nodded towards a drawer. Her lips were blue and her breath rasped out at irregular intervals as she huddled over the child. He found the keys, then pulled the drawer right out and let it fall to the floor.

  ‘Good for you,’ he told her. ‘Now don’t call anybody for twenty minutes. Understand? If you do we’ll be back for the kid.’

  Mrs Johnson nodded again as she struggled to breathe. She was still nodding, her back bent double to take the strain off her ribs, as the men reversed the noisy car out into the street and drove away. She didn’t phone for help. It was her three-year-old daughter who found the mobile, pressed the pre-set key for her daddy and told him: ‘Mummy poorly.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  My last girlfriend was an athlete. She would have made our Olympic team if it hadn’t been for injury, but she was still pretty good. We used to go running round the golf course together, and through the woods, but there was a twenty-year age difference and it soon started to show. I didn’t enjoy the running overmuch but I liked being fit, and as they say, it feels good when you stop.

  I was reduced to Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings, and was enjoying the self-righteousness that punishing yourself to the edge of exhaustion induces when the phone rang. I was languishing in the shower, trying to decide between my usual chicken jalfrezi or something different from the takeaway, but the warbling reminded me that I hadn’t been out for a pint with Dave this week, and it sounded like his ring.

  I jumped out, rubbed off the surplus moisture, and spoke into the phone: ‘Some pubs are far away, some pubs are near. If you’re offering to take me to one I might even buy you a beer.’

  ‘Evening Charlie,’ the duty sergeant replied. ‘I take it you were expecting somebody else.’

  ‘Oh, hello Arthur. I thought it might be Sparky offering to take me out. Go on, what have we got?’

  ‘Sorry to bother you but it’s a bit garbled and Davy Rose is attending a burglary at Sylvan Fields. A GP in the Westwood estate received an emergency call about a woman having an asthma attack. She wen
t off in an ambulance but he’s rung us to say that there were signs of violence in the room where he found her.’

  ‘Does the woman have a husband?’ It’s usually the husband.

  ‘He was miles away but he raised the alarm. I think the woman must have managed to ring him.’

  It wasn’t the husband. ‘OK. Give me the address. You got me out of the shower so I’ll pull some clothes on and ring you from the car in about three minutes. See what else you can find out.’

  I dressed again in the clothes I’d worn all day and gave a hungry look at the takeaway menu as I left home. The duty sergeant didn’t have anything to add to what he’d already told me except that the woman was called Johnson, her three-year-old daughter was with her and her husband was on his way to Heckley General, where she’d been taken. I rang Maggie Madison and asked her to go there and handle that end. There’s a law against using the phone whilst driving, but what the heck, everybody does it and it makes you feel clever and important.

  The sun had set but there was no cloud cover and the sky was still light when I arrived. It was a tidy, detached house on the edge of the estate. One of our panda cars had made the initial response to the call, and they were waiting for me. A neighbour had explained what Mr Johnson did for a living and told them that it looked as though his Subaru Impreza had been stolen. I glanced through the open door and saw the damage inside. It looked senseless, but it wasn’t. They’d done it to instil terror in the poor woman, make her compliant. They wanted the keys to the car, not a conversation. A quick glance around supported my initial conclusions: none of the other rooms had been turned over and it wasn’t the sort of house that would have a Turner hanging on the kitchen wall or a few emeralds in a drawer. Their most expensive possession was the car, and it had gone.

  Motive: theft of motor vehicle. I was sure of it. It happens all the time. I rang Maggie at the hospital and she had to come outside to use her phone.

  ‘Ask Mr Johnson if there should be a Subaru standing on the drive, Maggie.’

  ‘He’s here,’ Maggie replied, ‘outside the hospital. His daughter is with him so he’s had to bring her out. Hang on, I’ll ask him.’

  There was a long silence, then: ‘Are you there, boss?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Affirmative the car. Looks like they stole it.’

  ‘It’s a vehicle theft, then. How’s Mrs Johnson?’

  ‘She’s in a bad way, in intensive care.’

  ‘Right. I’ll protect the scene, then, just in case. Can you ask Mr Johnson if his car is fitted with a Tracker, please?’ Just in case meant just in case she dies. If she did, I’d launch a murder enquiry and the purse strings would be loosened. We’d test for footprints, DNA, fibres and anything else we could think of. Much of the testing for DNA would be speculative, because you can’t see the stuff. Swabs would be taken in likely places and all the tests run on them. Most, nearly all, would be a waste of time, but sometimes you get lucky. For a simple car theft the SOCO would fit the case into his workload and come along when he had the chance. He’d dust around for fingerprints and that would be it. Except…

  ‘Boss…’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Negative, no Tracker fitted.’

  ‘Thanks. That means we’ll have to find it the hard way. Ask him the number.’

  I telephoned HQ and had an APB put out for the Subaru and asked for all units to look for it. It could have been stolen to order, in which case it would be spirited far away, as fast as possible, or it could have been taken to use on a job. If the villains were planning a job, we were in with a chance. That was the except.

  I found a fish and chip shop open and had a special and chips, washed down with Tango. I ate them from the paper, sitting on a wall outside the chippy as it grew dark around me. As soon as reinforcements arrived to preserve the crime scene I went home. It had been a long day.

  Through the night they stabilised Mrs Johnson’s breathing and took her off the critical list. They increased her medication but decided to keep her for another day as a precaution. Half an hour after starting work, the six-to-two shift found the Subaru parked innocently in a street of domestics just outside the double-yellow zone, barely a mile from the Westwoods. It was in the end parking place, ready for a quick getaway. I learnt all this as I hobbled into the station at seven, the night before’s jogging making itself felt.

  ‘It’s all yours, then, Jeff,’ I told Jeff Caton, up in the office, trying to hide my reluctance to hand the case over. Mrs Johnson’s recovery had taken the pressure off me, but the Magdalena murder was bogged down and the thought of dashing all over town after more obvious criminals had great appeal. ‘Let me know if you need any help,’ I added as I accepted a mug of coffee from Maggie.

  ‘Ooh, I think we’ll be able to manage,’ he replied with a grin, reading my mind.

  ‘So what’s a corgi fitter?’ somebody asked.

  ‘They work for the gas board. Everything you have done to your gas has to be done by a corgi fitter.’

  ‘So what’s corgis to do with it?’

  ‘It’s like canaries down a coalmine,’ Brendan explained. ‘Every gas fitter has a corgi in a little basket. If there’s a gas leak it keels over.’

  ‘It stands for something…something…Registered Gas Installer,’ Dave informed us.

  ‘Council of Registered Gas Installers,’ another added. Individually we might be rubbish, but between us we know everything.

  ‘So why did they name a dog after a company that looks for gas leaks?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Because the Queen keeps corgis,’ Brendan informed us. ‘They used to be called something else, but one day there was a massive gas leak in Buckingham Palace and this brave little dog dashed into the State Room, where the Queen was about to give somebody a knighthood, and grabbed the train of her frock and started to drag her towards the door. The Queen didn’t realise what it was all about and, as she just happened to be holding a sword in her hand, she chopped off the dog’s head. “There, you little bugger,” she told it, “that’ll learn you,” but then she smelt gas and realised what the dog had been trying to tell her. On the spot she decreed that they be known as corgis for ever after.’

  ‘And she vowed never to smile again,’ Jeff added.

  ‘Oh aye. I forgot that bit.’

  I shook my head and stood up.

  Villains are unable to tell if a car has a Tracker device fitted, so they can’t take it to a secure hideout in case it has. They just leave it at the side of the road and wait. If we don’t collect it within hours they assume it’s safe, and pick it up at their convenience. Jeff would have the Subaru watched all day. They didn’t steal it to save a mile walk home. He’d also ask the mobiles not to stray too far away from Heckley, and ask for the chopper to be standing by with full tanks. We both had a feeling about the car, suspected it was all part of a bigger plan.

  Maggie and Dave joined me in my office. They were about halfway through the Popes who lived within East Pennine division, and Leeds were similarly placed. We were having to ask neighbouring divisions to help in the trace, interview and eliminate process because we didn’t have the manpower and my HMET authority cut across boundaries.

  When we’d finished discussing the case Dave said: ‘Did you hear about DCS Swainby?’ It had been exactly a week since he dropped his bombshell at the meeting and the rumour machine had been as quiet as a dead sheep on valium.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it appears that vice have taken an interest as his name came up in the Operation Swampland disclosures. They’ve found thousands of obscene images on his computer.’

  Maggie said: ‘Swampland? That was the paedophilia enquiry, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Dave replied. ‘They busted a major player and came up with all these names, and vice are slowly working their way through our quota.’

  I remembered what Swainby had told us. ‘When I saw him at his meeting he said we’d hear rumours. He
asked us to give him the benefit of the doubt; claimed they were without foundation.’

  ‘I bet he did.’

  ‘Well I’ll not be listening to them. So what are we doing?’

  ‘More Popes,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Right. Keep at it. Any worth me doing a follow-up on?’

  There were, so that’s what I did, but it was a waste of time. There was a couple who had convictions for receiving stolen property, one burglar with a single conviction eight years previously and one who had defrauded the DSS of several thousand pounds until an investigator caught him on video laying a block paving drive for a neighbour. None of them appeared to be related, all had wives who gave them alibis, none knew of anybody with that name who had been away from Heckley for several years. It wasn’t conclusive, but the slippers by the hearth, the half-finished ship in the bottle and the racing pigeons down on the allotment all conspired to tell me I could be better employed. Mid-afternoon I called it a day and went back to the nick. The temperature had dropped and thunder clouds were building up in the west.

  Jeff was all alone there, at his desk, waiting for the phone call. He hadn’t learnt that it never rings when you’re waiting for it. You should immerse yourself in something fascinating, or put a pan of milk on. Then it rings.

  ‘Any action?’ I asked, after I’d made us both a coffee and collected two KitKats from my private stash. Before I sat down I walked over to the door and switched on the office lights. All over town people were doing the same thing, lighted windows spreading like a rash ahead of the storm.

  He shook his head. ‘And you?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll be lucky and have a quiet weekend.’

  We both took big bites of the biscuits, and that’s when the phone rang. Jeff swallowed first. ‘DS Caton,’ he spluttered into it as the first flurry of rain rattled against the glass.

  They’d knocked over a security man delivering cash for the ATMs in the wall of the supermarket just off the town centre, and escaped with two cash boxes of money. He’d been bashed on the helmet with an iron bar, and one of the robbers may have been armed. He had something ‘like a shotgun’ wrapped in a plastic bag and they both wore stocking masks. They’d driven off in a dark blue saloon, possibly a Ford Escort. The standard procedure is to flee from the scene in one vehicle, which will probably be seen by witnesses, and switch to a waiting vehicle that has been left somewhere quiet, like in the middle of a housing estate. We went downstairs to the control room and the duty sergeant handed Jeff a headset.