An Accidental Death: A DC Smith Investigation

by Peter Grainger

  ‘Oh no, McVie, you are mistaken. Surely you are referring to Captain Smith?’

  Hamilton stepped into the bedroom from the landing.

  ‘It is Captain Smith, isn’t it? Late of the Intelligence Corps?’

  Smith didn’t answer. Waters seemed to have been hit only the once – he probably couldn’t feel the pain yet and his eyes were alert enough; he was looking at Smith with a question which meant that he had followed what Hamilton had said. Behind him, Smith had sensed some movement as soon as Hamilton entered the room, and instinct told him that it was the girl rather than Petar Subic. Hamilton half-turned and spoke something, after which two of the guards went back out of the room, leaving just McVie.

  ‘Captain Smith. You did me the honour of checking up on my record, such as it is. Naturally I wanted to return the favour. But this is a grubby business for a fellow officer to have got himself mixed up in, I have to say. I’ve come to relieve you of it.’

  Hamilton looked past him towards the girl and the man. His face seemed if anything more drawn and cadaverous than the last time that Smith had seen him but a light glittered in the eyes – and then it changed suddenly to one of recognition.

  Hamilton said, ‘Oh, I see now. I had been wondering-’

  Hanna Subic was past Smith in an instant. She launched herself at Hamilton and had a hand on his face before McVie stepped in. The guard took her short hair in one hand and drove the heel of his other palm up hard under her chin. Her head snapped back and she was reeling towards Smith. Petar came forward and caught her with his good arm, shouting, and then Smith was going forward towards Hamilton instinctively. Mcvie had hold of him before he was even close, forcing him back against the side wall with a powerful grip on each bicep. Smith relaxed instantly, making no attempt to get free, holding eye contact with the guard.

  ‘As I said, a messy business. McVie, we’ll take these two. As it’s a citizen’s arrest, I don’t think I need to say anything about rights, do I, Captain Smith? We’ll hand them over to the proper authorities, naturally.’

  ‘You would not know proper authority if it stood in front of you holding a placard.’

  It was first time that Smith had spoken to him since he entered the room. Hamilton looked at him with something between amusement and contempt.

  ‘You defend these people?’

  ‘No crime was committed on your property other than trespass – unless I count your guards assaulting Petar Subic. I am investigating the death of a young man. Petar Subic is wanted in connection with that death. Your duty is to leave him here with me.’

  ‘No crime? Conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism, targeted against members of her majesty’s armed services?’

  ‘You are an ex-member of those services – one that left them under something of a cloud, unless I’m much mistaken.’

  Hamilton assumed a bored expression and said, ‘I really don’t have time for all this.’

  McVie released one of Smith’s arms, the right one, and turned to face Hamilton, ready to carry out the next order. He maintained a firm hold on Smith’s left arm.

  ‘But I do have one question, Smith. You could have found very little to go on at Manley Park. It was all guesswork, wasn’t it – except for the ashes? I ask only as a chess player.’

  ‘Yes. When they disappeared, it became obvious that you had something to hide. It made me keep looking. It was a bad move.’

  Hamilton glanced at McVie.

  ‘And can you believe that they did it without asking me? They thought I would approve. Without that, you had nothing.’

  ‘No, not quite. Your guards had obviously been in a scrap – he’s a big lad, isn’t he?’ nodding towards Petar Subic who was now sitting on the bed again with Hanna. She had recovered but for the first time looked a little frightened. ‘And they were edgy, too, said something about ‘another one’ when I showed up, so I knew I wasn’t the first visitor through the hole in the fence. And then I spoke to you… I would have kept at it anyway. Are you going to tell this character to let go of my arm or have we got to announce an engagement?’

  McVie looked down at Smith and tightened the grip further – he looked down at him and looked too for a sign that it was hurting but found nothing but his own stare returned. Eventually Smith said quietly to McVie, ‘Have it your own way, then.’

  Hamilton said to the couple on the bed, ‘Get up,’ and in the pause that followed, there was a creak on the stairs, and then another. They all heard it, and Smith thought, not the clumsy-footed guards in their sham, soldiers’ boots - someone else, coming quietly, coming to listen in, to see what’s going on, to see why there is a delay.

  Smith said, ‘Blimey, how many more? I’m going to be writing witness statements for a month!’

  It drew everyone’s attention to the door.

  Afterwards, not one of the other five people in the room could quite explain what happened next but McVie crumpled slowly to the floor, both hands clutching at his throat, gasping for breath. He writhed there, eyes bulging, inarticulate grunts coming with each attempt to take in air. All eyes were upon him until Smith said in a matter of fact way, ‘I don’t think it was anything he ate…’

  Then he turned to Hamilton.

  ‘You can’t see it yet, but you lost this long before laughing boy here hit the floor. You could call for reinforcements if you like but I don’t need to do that. The people out there on the landing, if I’m right about them, aren’t coming in to sort this out – at least, they won’t be after they’ve heard what I’m about to tell you. Besides, unless I’m very much mistaken, they have no powers of arrest, anyway. Isn’t that right, Mr Fox?’

  Hamilton looked out of the room towards the landing but there was no reply.

  ‘Get out of the way, Smith. They’ll be punished for the boy’s death, if only indirectly. You cannot defend what they were trying to do.’

  ‘First of all, I don’t know yet exactly what they were trying to do – but I am beginning to see why they wanted to do it, whatever it was.’

  He looked down again at McVie, who seemed to be no longer in imminent danger of asphyxiation. His breathing was now only laboured rather than desperate, and Smith caught the look in his eye.

  ‘Can you hear me, son? I could have had that pistol out of your shoulder holster a dozen times, but I don’t need it. Neither do you because this mission is over. But if I see you going for it, I’ll break every bone in your hand.’

  The room was silent again after that. Smith looked around at everyone. He said to Waters, ‘You alright?’

  The boy looked a little dazed, as if he had gone to sleep as usual and woken up on a film set, but his nod was confident enough. Then Smith turned his attention back to Hamilton.

  ‘It’s not my area of expertise but I’d say you are not a well man.’

  Hamilton’s eyes left Smith for a moment and went to the girl.

  ‘It’s alright, she hasn’t told me a thing about that but it sort of became clear to me a while ago. I’d say that in the not-too-distant past, some consultant somewhere has pressed your game clock for the last time. You haven’t got many moves left, have you?’

  Hamilton said, ‘So? Do I look afraid?’

  ‘Good for you, sir. You must have at least one of the qualities left that led to you becoming an officer in the first place. But you need to understand how this is going to play out if by some miracle you manage to get this pair out of the room past me and Detective Constable Waters, who is making a splendid recovery as we speak. First you will have to find a way of keeping us quiet. Now, your friend out there will know some pretty dodgy people but silencing coppers? Especially an old one like me with nothing to lose? I can tell you now that Mr Fox is already losing interest. But there is worse to come.’

  McVie made some slight movement on the floor in front of him. Smith stepped forward and stood with his right foot on the security guard’s right hand.

  ‘Over there on that chair is a document wallet. It was prep
ared by Mr Mirsad Subic. I don’t know if you ever met him when you were in Bosnia but I think you knew his brother. Anyway, Mr Subic is still a lawyer, and he certainly knows how to fill a document wallet. On the way here, I only had time to glance through it but I got the gist of it. Your name is in it a lot, along with plenty of others.’

  Outside there were low voices, and Smith was sure that one of them belonged to a woman – the glamorous assistant, no doubt. Hamilton looked that way again, more uncertain now, and perhaps hoping for some direction. Smith waited another ten seconds and then pushed it home.

  ‘Look. There are people in here who need treatment. It’s simple enough, Hamilton. There are multiple copies of these documents, and Mr Subic assures me that that there is much more available if it’s required. He’s not the vengeful sort himself, if you ask me, but when it comes to his daughter…’

  Smith looked at Hanna Subic. The fear had gone – now she simply nodded and stared unflinchingly at Hamilton. Hamilton looked from her to Smith.

  ‘Smith, they came after you, didn’t they? I know that they did. Here, back in England after your tours in Belfast, they came after you. You know what this is about, what it’s like.’

  Smith shook his head.

  ‘With as much respect as I can muster, which isn’t a lot, they came after me because I did my job; these people, misguided as they might be, came after you because you didn’t. At least, that how it seems to me now. I haven’t read it all yet – but I will. If I’m wrong, I’ll apologise.’

  The voices were further away now. They had gone down the stairs, would almost certainly leave the house and be seen no more. A part of Smith wanted to go to the window and look out, just to see if he had called it right but instead he continued with Hamilton.

  ‘If these people do not come into my custody right now, if there is any other outcome,’ and he stood on McVie’s hand a little harder, ‘a copy of those documents will appear on an appropriate news-desk first thing tomorrow morning, and then another and another until somebody prints it. Somebody will print it, Hamilton. I don’t know how long you’ve got left but that’s going to be the final chapter of your story, the last moves in your game. If they come with me, it’ll be lost for months in our court system – I use the word ‘system’ loosely. And I can see a scenario in which Petar Subic’s lawyers even advise him not to reveal his motives for wanting to pay you a visit. I don’t know, I’m only speculating. But you’ll have time to make a different move if you want, slip away quietly. Which is probably more than you deserve.’

  Hamilton looked hard at him, and then slowly around the room. McVie coughed on the floor, and Smith pressed a fraction more on his hand until he groaned and cursed. Hamilton looked down at his head of security and then finally back at Smith.

  ‘So, Captain Hamilton, what’s it going to be?’

  He took Waters’ chin in his hand and pushed it first to the left and then to the right.

  ‘See? I told you to make a move while you were still young and good-looking. Now you’re only young.’

  Hanna Subic took his place in front of Waters and examined the nose more thoroughly before she said, ‘It’s broken for sure. You need to have the septum checked, to see if it’s ruptured but it should be OK. Don’t listen to him – you will still be handsome.’

  They were standing in the hallway of the house. Smith had been outside and looked around but there was no sign of anyone else now. The street was quiet and empty, and the rain was nothing more than a damp mist that smelled of autumn.

  Hanna had phoned her father and told him that there had been a delay, that was all, that there was nothing for him to worry about. In answer to a question, she had said, ‘No, I’m going with him.’ There had been a brief argument, with Smith himself shaking his head at her but to no avail. When she closed the phone, she simply stood closer to Petar, so close that you could not have got the document wallet between them.

  Petar said, ‘What will happen now?’

  They all looked at Smith.

  ‘Now? Now we go to the police station and have a cup of tea. Then we get you a solicitor, which, obviously, cannot be your uncle. But I’m sure he’ll take care of all that. And then we ask you to tell us again what happened when you met Wayne Fletcher on the river. We write it all down and you spend some time in the cells. Alone.’

  He looked at Hanna.

  ‘What will the charges be?’

  ‘I’m not a lawyer. I just-’

  ‘But if you’re going to arrest him, you must have a charge.’

  ‘But you are a lawyer’s daughter. So you probably already know it’ll be manslaughter.’

  She held onto Petar’s arm more tightly.

  ‘It’ll be involuntary, I’d say. There was provocation and the boy was under the influence. There are other mitigating factors. What will it come down to, Einstein?’

  Waters blinked and wiped away another trickle of blood from under his nose.

  ‘I’m not sure… I mean I’ve never… The question of excessive force?’

  ‘See? Spot on. Either way, there’s plenty for a good QC to work with on this one.’

  Petar looked round at them all, and Smith wondered how much of that he had understood. Then the young man lifted his two wrists towards the policemen and said, ‘So you arrest me now?’

  Hanna went to speak and Smith stopped her with a raised hand.

  ‘No, he’s right, he understands. Let’s do at least one thing by the book in this. It might save my career.’

  He took out the handcuffs from his jacket pocket and placed them carefully around Petar’s wrists. They were hardly big enough, and Smith thought, a bloody shame, he should be rowing something or throwing something. Then he began with ‘Petar Subic, I am-’ and stopped.

  They all waited, wondering, and then Smith turned to Waters and said, ‘Go on.’

  Another silence. Smith looked at Hanna and Petar Subic and said, ‘If that’s alright?’

  They nodded, and Waters cleared his throat.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘I have to say, Smith, that it sometimes seems to me that you spend more time in this office than I do myself.’

  ‘I can’t believe that’s true, sir. I mean it might be true that it seems that way but it can’t be literally true, sir, can it?’

  Detective Superintendent Allen looked up from the files in front of him, first at Smith and then at Detective Inspector Reeve.

  ‘Well, obviously not, Smith, but you take my point – it’s only a week or two since you last sat there. I suppose these are different circumstances but – I don’t know.’

  Allen shook his head and stared down at the papers again. Smith looked across at Reeve, who was shaking her head back at him for different reasons. Then he looked away from her and out of the window. Allen’s office was two floors above that of Alison Reeve, and the view over Kings Lake was correspondingly more impressive – more of the old city to the left with its distant churches, the Corn Exchange building, the City Hall, and more of the new commercial and industrial areas out to the right. He could even see the tower block in which Mrs Budge and her sole offspring spent their days, at least for now. Budgie had been caught again last week, by uniform on a routine patrol. He’d been kneeling in front of a letter-box, poking a coat-hanger through it. When invited to explain what he was doing, Budgie said that he had found it on the path outside and was returning the hanger to its owners. Dear me… But at least he had recovered his modem operandi.

  ‘Anyway, let’s get on with it. This magistrates’ hearing has caught us on the hop. How on earth did it get onto the lists so quickly? I can’t make that out at all.’

  Smith felt Reeve’s eyes on him again but he stared ahead resolutely, just blinking once or twice.

  ‘Now they are going for bail. Surely that’s absurd, what with the failure to report what happened to the Fletcher boy? We cannot support that. I’ve already told the CPS.’

  Allen looked at them both again as if h
e wanted their comments but nothing was forthcoming, and so he continued.

  ‘But the thing is that this is starting to generate press interest, and now someone has to deal with it. That someone is me. I need to be fully briefed on where we are with this, and how we got to where we are. At the moment it’s local press interest in the boy’s death, and you can imagine how keen they are to know all the details, having first reported it as accidental. But if any of the other business leaks out, well, we’ll have the world’s press camped outside, and-’

  ‘If, sir?’

  Allen stopped, open-mouthed and in mid sentence.

  ‘You said ‘if’ it leaks out, sir. I’d say it’s more a question of when.’

  Allen looked genuinely surprised as he said to Smith, ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. His defence might not want it aired in the trial but afterwards? Lots of people will have seen at least some of that documentation by then. I mean, Petar Subic had to give some reason why he was on that river, other than for the exercise. Lots of people, sir. There are some funny sorts out there these days. It’ll get all political, if you ask me.’

  The Superintendent paused for a moment.

  ‘Thank you, Smith. I am aware of that possibility. That is, in part, why we are here now. Can we get on?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘I want to deal with this in two sections – first, the drowning of Wayne Fletcher and the way in which it was investigated, and second, the way in which Petar Subic was apprehended. There are some – complications with that, aren’t there? No – I don’t need any answer on that yet, Smith, it was a rhetorical question. I should know better by now… DI Reeve, if you would start us off, with the investigation into the drowning?’

  Everything that Alison Reeve said was the truth and she told almost the whole truth. She explained that she had given the paperwork to Detective Sergeant Smith because she had some slight concerns over the procedures in the initial investigation. He had reported that whilst some decisions as to personnel might be open to question, the correct procedures had been applied. However, during the course of his reading, he had noticed an unusual detail in the autopsy report and what happened subsequently had followed from that. When he was eventually located, Petar Subic had cooperated fully, confirming everything that Detective Sergeant Smith had concluded as the investigation developed.