by Karen Botha
“Yeah, the day after I stood up to him, he produced this deal. Funny that! But, it works for me. I’d prefer not to be around him every day, but my role pays well. When you’re at my level, it’s difficult to find another one without being headhunted, which is never a quick process.”
“But what happens when this guy leaves?”
She shrugs. “Well, it won’t matter anymore then. Quite frankly, I’m a little bored, that’s why I’m online the whole time. But I don’t want to change anything because, if my mum has a bad day, I can head home and no-one asks any questions. If I was more challenged at work, then that wouldn’t be possible, so I stick it out.”
“Your mum is sick?”
“Yeah, didn’t I say when we chatted? She has Parkinson’s. My priority is to care for her. Keeping this job means that I’ve been able to pay for twenty-four-hour carers and give her the best pain medication. If I’d left, I couldn’t do that, so a new job or a court case wasn’t really an option. I think that’s why my boss, the fat controller as I like to call him, well, I think that’s why he targeted me. He assumed I was out of options.”
“Guess he underestimated you,” Mitchell says almost to himself.
“Yeah, people seem to.” She sips her coffee again before asking. “Where do you want to go tonight? There’s a few good bars down on the high street.” She points to the bottom of the park where Mitchell spied a few bars between fashionable coffee shops and trendy restaurants earlier.
Half an hour later and Mitchell is waiting at one of those bars. He’s never understood why a place will be decorated to look shabby. This place has stripped floorboards which are homely, but the paintwork is distressed and that says it all. Why someone would want to go to the trouble of painting, to only strip half of it off again, is beyond his comprehension.
Nevertheless, the music is good but it’s a little loud, and he’s hoping his head will hold out. He takes another pill with his beer before heading back to the table with Rachel’s gin and elderflower tonic.
“I ordered some cheesy chips, hope you don’t mind?” he says as he places the drinks down.
“No, my favourite. You read my thoughts.” She tucks her brown hair over an ear.
They get to chatting and Mitchell doesn’t notice the girl when she brings the food order over. He leans back from where he’s been resting his chin in his hand as Rachel tells him about her life. How she used to travel the world with work before her mum got sick. She manages IT divisions and used to work for a US company which meant, not only were her hours messed up with jet lag half the time, but she would also work American hours out of the UK office.
“It was tiring and very stressful, but I loved it. Until mum. I didn’t want to be away so much then, so I found a different job over here. It’s less money - much less money actually – but enough.”
Mitchell nods, understanding her point. “I was in the army. I was posted away a lot as I was a specialist. It’s not something I talk about much.” He drifts off wondering why he even opened that can of worms. It just spilled out.
“Specialist in what?” she asks, as expected, but now he doesn’t feel he can shut down.
“Well, originally I was in the para’s, which I loved, but I’d been there and done everything so I was lucky enough to get some additional training that sent me to the real critical situations. If there was a crisis, I would be part of the SWAT team that was despatched.”
“To do what?” It’s Rachel’s time to sit forward, engrossed in Mitchell’s words.
He doesn’t hesitate before replying, “Well, the para’s was an option, but I’d had enough of that, so I decided to go for the mountain crew instead.”
“Ah, OK. What does that mean?” She doesn’t let her eyes slip away from him.
“Well, we could be sent anywhere. If they needed someone to scale buildings in hostage situations, then that would be us, but equally we could be launching down rock faces in the Afghan mountains, surviving in arctic conditions, after a long-distance ski.”
“Oh, wow, so where have you been, did you go to Afghanistan?”
But Mitchell has already closed down again. How could he have said so much? He didn’t even realise, he was just chatting and he nearly emptied his guts all over this table. He stands and heads to the bar.
“I’ll get another round,” he shouts over his shoulder.
“But you’ve not finished this one yet?”
Paula
“Mo!” I say, “The guys are round the corner from where Lucy is right now, waiting for Brian to show up for his imaginary new job.” I collect my bag and we rush out of the pizza joint, leaving way too much cash on the table. I’m speaking too quickly, tripping over my words in my haste to explain everything to him.
“Slow down.” He places a hand on my elbow as I barge out of the restaurant and onto the pavement outside.
“Sorry.” I breathe. “Right. So, Lucy called and said she is with Brian. She wanted to be the one to bring him into us, a kind of payback for him attacking her. And she’s done it.”
“Brilliant. So why the panic? The guys will just pick her up and bring her in. She’s safe, isn’t she?” He eyes me. His tone cautious.
A siren slices through the London congestion, a police car travelling down the centre of the two lanes, on his way to who knows what catastrophe, kicking off around the city.
“Paula, tell me.”
“Well, she had a little accident.”
He stops walking, grabs both my biceps and faces me, eyebrows raised.
“She hit him over the head and he might be dead. She can’t tell whether he’s breathing.”
“Can you girls never just do things by the book?” He’s shouting. Mo never shouts, but he’s definitely shouting now. “Why did she have to go running after him, anyway?”
“I don’t know. It must have been self-defence.”
“Grr. Why is nothing simple?” he asks before racing after me.
We grab Mo’s Mondeo and I punch the address into the SAT NAV. “You know we can’t let uniform know we’re there. I need to know what we’re dealing with between ourselves, before we bring them in.”
I cringe, waiting for the backlash. It doesn’t come. “I know,” he says eventually, switching lanes to head under the tunnel and out to East London.
“This is an issue.” Mo verbalises what’s on my mind as soon as we arrive. Brian is bleeding from the back of his head. Lucy is standing over his body, staring. Her eyes are cold and, as she lifts her head to meet mine as I approach, a shiver runs down my spine.
“What happened, Lucy?” I ask, trying to figure out what state she’s in. She was a mess on the phone, but now, well, she seems different somehow.
“I don’t know. He was running away and I was furious with him for not answering my questions. I’d brought a chair leg to defend myself if I needed it, but then I just hit him with it. I don’t recollect doing it, but he’s here, and the chair leg is here.” She lifts her hand in case I’d missed the slab of wood she’s still clinging onto.
“Is there any way you could have been defending yourself?” Mo asks, “Perhaps he was attacking you and just turned his head whilst you were fighting and that could be how you hit the back of his skull?”
Good point, Mo. “That could be what happened couldn’t it, Lucy? Perhaps Mo has jogged your memory about what happened?”
She looks at me, her face still, and then at Mo. Her eyes still devoid of any glimmer of emotion. “I’m not sure, I can’t recall,” she says.
“But, think about it Lucy. If you can remember everything happening that way, then it would be better than if you remembered him running away and you hitting him.”
Mo and I will Lucy to process our coaching and heed our advice without us having to come out and say point blank what she should do. She has an issue here because, whichever way we look at it, she came out tonight with a premeditated intention of causing potential harm. The chair leg could have been to protect hersel
f, but we’re going to have a hard time convincing a jury that she brought it here for self-protection. The copper in me is wondering why on earth she would want to confront a guy who almost choked the life out of her the last time he saw her. And why she would want to do this down a dark alley, whilst carrying a chair leg.
I know Mo feels the same.
“That’s how it happened. We were fighting. He must have turned as the chair leg came up and, rather than pushing him away with it, I hit the back of his head.” She speaks slowly, clearly enunciating her words. The Lucy I know would be a gibbering idiot by now and it’s disconcerting to have someone you know so well behaving so out of character. The tension between the three of us reaches an all-time high and I’m conscious of every small word I utter, in case I either inadvertently risk my job further, or push Mo over the edge. I’m acutely aware that his massive resource of patience is running thin.
“Right, let’s call this in,” Mo says, nodding his head at me.
As I run through my phone contacts, the air in the alley is so brittle it may snap. No-one speaks, there’s nothing to say. Any words uttered right now will be the wrong ones. There is no traffic in the street at either end of the slim passageway. Lucy picked this place for a reason. My stomach is taut, my breathing shallow as I take in the scene and press dial.
“What the fuck?” Mo screams, hopping to one side.
I drop the phone from my ear and all three of us back up against the wall.
The body is moving, Brian isn’t dead.
“We didn’t check him!” I state the obvious. With all the commotion of us coming to Lucy’s aid, we forgot our training and didn’t confirm that Brian was actually dead.
“He’s alive.” Lucy’s voice is flat, where it should be elated.
Paula
Back at the station, there’s no time to spare.
“We have Declan Meredith in interview room three,” Jim says as soon as Mo and I walk in. “He’s been here about an hour.”
“Great, thanks,” I say.
Mo nods. “I’ll do this one, you observe. I don’t want any complications further down the line. This case is growing messier by the day already.”
I think better of replying and instead grab my file and papers off my desk and head down to the observation room behind him.
“I put some papers in the file for you, Paula, you may want to feed their info through to Mo,” Jim shouts as I head out of the door.
Mo doesn’t delay and heads straight into the room. “Declan, thanks for coming in.”
“Like I had a lot of choice.” He sniffs.
Ignoring Declan's whining, Mo continues, “Thanks, also, for sending over the documentation - eventually. We’ve been through it and there are no tangible links between any of your members and those poor people whose lives ended abruptly.”
Declan nods. “That’s good then.” He shrugs, curving the corners of his mouth down as his lips pull taut.
“No, it’s not good, because it doesn’t add up.”
“I don’t understand?” Declan starts.
“The one connecting factor with all these murders is that they were all on your websites. There should be a link.”
“But there isn’t. So, you’re out of luck.”
That’s not the way to work with Mo. He’s already aggravated with this case, he’s not going to take kindly to being spoken to like that. “The fact that there isn’t means that you have withheld knowledge from us. You know that’s an offence?”
Declan’s eyes move from left to right, considering the information Mo just bestowed on him. I don’t expect it’s a surprise to him, but being confronted with it, may just push him over the edge. For the first time, he falters. He doesn’t do anything, it’s not something you can see, but you sense it. His confidence wavers.
Mo pushes on, seizing the moment, “I want to know what that missing piece of information is, Declan. And, what’s becoming of increasingly more interest to me, is why you have refused to hand that information over.” Mo lets the following silence overpower the room.
But Declan is good. He sits back in his chair, looks at his brief who shakes his head. Declan folds his arms across his chest and stares at Mo.
This isn’t going anywhere at this rate. Mo needs me to feed a morsel of info into his ear that he can work with. I flip through the file, looking for Jim’s notes. Grasping them, I speed read.
“Ask him about his wife, Mo.”
“What about her?” Declan replies when Mo does as asked.
Mo doesn’t reply, largely because I’ve not told him yet. On purpose. I want this to play out, now we have our suspect on the back foot. “Tell me about your wife ,or we’re going to have to bring her in, and let her know what you get up to in your spare time.”
“For fuck’s sake, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Ask him who his wife knows that we may have an interest in.”
“Is this about her brother again?” he asks.
“Erm? You tell me,” Mo says.
“Her maiden name is Moody, her brother is Eric.”
Mo stands up, slams the table with his fist. “And you didn’t think to mention that? We had to get you down here in order for you to reveal that little nugget of information Declan?”
“I’m sorry!” His tone is sarcastic. “How am I supposed to know what you need from me when you’re busy playing mind games? Just come out with what you want, man, and it may be a little easier to help you.”
“I’ve already told you, I’d like to know all the information you’re withholding and why.” Mo stares him down. His pen is right next to his hand and I know he wants to pick it up and jab it at Declan, but he keeps his hands, his entire body, motionless as he eyes his suspect.
“Declan met his wife at school, they were childhood sweethearts,” I recount into Mo’s ear piece. I feel sick. ‘Childhood sweethearts my arse.’ Declan has known Eric all that time, they were friends. It’s how he and his wife met.
Mo continues to challenge Declan on the matter, whilst I hunt around for more meaning. I get on the phone to Jim for some answers.
“Yeah, they met at school, and have been friends since. I’ve been looking at their social media now, ascertaining some links.”
“And...?”
“Well, it appears they were all in mourning for a loss a few years ago, one of their school friends died out in Afghan.”
I know what he’s going to say. “Hit me with it, what was his name?”
“Will Brown,” Jim confirms.
The links are starting to tie up. They’re always there, it’s just a matter of digging deep enough for the lies to start unravelling.. When that happens, the case comes together.
“So, who is in the barge then?” It hits me that if the owner of the barge is dead, then we are no closer to our murderer.
Whilst I’m still on the phone, I relay the information to Mo.
“OK, so you’re not going to be upfront and tell me that you and Eric were friends at school along with a Will Brown.”
Declan’s mouth forms an “Ohh” as he recoils.
Mo continues, “That’s fine, you see, we have the information, anyway. The problem you have is that, if you don’t fill in some of what we think we know with what you actually know, then it will be much harder for you in the long run.”
Adam
I barge into Eric’s office and plant my hands on his desk, leaning into his space as he sits at the other side of the desk.
“What?” he asks, his eyes all wide innocence.
“Don’t you ‘What?’ me, you piece of shit. You know exactly why I am here.”
He thinks about denying it, but the idea passes off his face as quickly as it appeared. “I’m sorry, she wanted to know how to find Brian. I told her not to go looking for him, that we’d do it. But she insisted on meeting him herself.”
I reach over the desk and grab his tee-shirt by the neck, crumpling it into a ball. The material
pinches against my fingers as I squeeze, and the pain feels good. “You knew what Lucy was going to do. You know she almost killed him, don’t you?”
“I did hear.” He places his hands on my fist and gently forces it down until I’ve released him.
At that moment, I’m thankful for the almighty disturbance as uniformed police smash down the reinforced entrance to the building. Scrambling in all directions, they blitz the place.
Eric has a sixth sense, which fires up his reactions. As the police bound up the stairs to his office, he tips his desk over. Papers fly everywhere and flutter to the floor like ticker tape. His computer lies smashed in a heap and the officers trip over the barrier as they run into it head on. Collecting themselves, they jump over it, but Eric is already through the door behind his desk, his footsteps heavy as he thunders away from them.
I step back, my foot throbbing from where the desk landed on it. I didn’t feel it at the time, but now, as I stand here with an armed officer attached to my elbow, the pulsing is all I can focus on.
He manhandles me, pulling my shirt out of my suit pants with the viciousness of his treatment. It’s not like I’m trying to escape, I’m going wherever he wants me. He forces me downstairs in front of him and gives me a shove. I almost fall, unstable as I am with my hands secured behind my back. I’m failing to tell him about Paula, he’s not interested in anything I have to say. My heart is thumping in my ears at the injustice of it all when I get another quick shove as he manoeuvres me into the back of a police car. The car shakes with the ferocity of the slamming door.
“Just call her, it’s Paula,” I yell again as he jogs off, locking the doors.
I only have to wait five minutes before I spy her. It looks like this sting was hers. I’d assumed it was money laundering or something, but no, she’s there in her stab vest, organising the troops. ‘Jeez, what have I got myself embroiled in?’