by Deborah Lucy
DCI Chris Rees had been well liked; his tell-it-like-it-is attitude to the chief officers had made him a few enemies of superintending officers, but the rank and file admired him for it. Hadn’t done him any good though, thought May, as he came off the phone. Another good one gone.
He moved quickly back to his console to get the details of the suspected murder.
‘What’s the number?’ he directed the question at the operator. The normality of his response checked the mood in the room. Suddenly it was steadied and responsive again.
‘Log eighty-five, boss,’ came the reply.
He looked at his computer screen as his fingers stabbed at the keyboard. He scrolled through the transcript of the log. A woman found dead, tied to her bed in the village of Ramsbury. He started to make the necessary phone calls to senior officers to give them news of both. Chief Officers first. Then the Head of Major Crime.
‘Are you having a fucking laugh, Bob? How much more shite are you going to keep giving me?’ the terse response to the report of another murder was spat out in the deep, gravel worn Glaswegian growl of Detective Chief Superintendent Clive Harker.
It was the third time in the previous six hours that May had contacted the Head of Major Crime for the force. The fallout from a drugs turf war with Southall and Bristol gangs using Swindon as their playground had left one local black teenager dead and his girlfriend missing, believed taken by the gang. A couple of their mates were in Great Western Hospital in Swindon with gunshot wounds from a very public shoot out and Harker was up to his neck in screaming families and community tension.
Adding to Harker’s woes, Bob May had also informed him earlier that night that Harker’s 35-year-old daughter, Gemma, had been picked up by a PC from a dingy stairwell in a block of flats in Penhill in Swindon. A sex worker, Gemma Harker had been left bloodied and bruised from another battering to her drug-wasted frame. May had established she’d been patched up at the Great Western and Harker took a note of the PC’s name, to speak to him when he could. Harker knew better than to go to the hospital. It would serve no purpose, Gemma was lost to him. He had to do everything from a distance, for his own sake and for the job.
May was unsympathetic. His finger was in the dyke that was the control room and he felt like the tide was about to overwhelm him. He was on the last night of five, twelve-hour night shifts and that night alone he’d dealt with three serious RTCs, two sudden deaths, five misper reports and all the usual trivia that people rang in with. He had a year to go before retirement and had every intention of not dying on duty due to the stress of the job. Chris Rees’s death would resonate that caution to many officers that day. It felt like every man for himself.
‘I’m just the messenger. But I need an SIO to send over to Ramsbury.’ May, a police federation rep, was not easily cowed by senior officers.
‘Ring Chris Rees, tell him to go over there,’ instructed Harker.
‘That was the other bit of bad news I had. Chris’s wife rang in a few minutes ago; he’s had a heart attack. He’s dead.’
‘What the fu…? Shit,’ he spat. Harker wasn’t prepared for this and it caught him unawares.
Rees had been troublesome to Harker. He was used to keen younger colleagues snapping at his heels, but rawly ambitious, Rees had been biting his legs, causing him grief with chief officers, briefing against him, trying to undermine him. Harker had responded with counter-briefings, questioning his ability, particularly during the course of a recent important Crown Court drugs trial that Rees had lost. The situation had disintegrated into a spiteful game of brinkmanship that now it seemed Harker emerged as the victor.
Now, Harker’s sense of self-preservation kicked in as his mind sped through his recent dealings with Rees. The pressure of the lost trial had obviously taken its toll. Could he have done more? Maybe. Had he made life difficult for Rees? Undoubtedly. There had been no love lost between them. Harker made the required but insincere noises to May because he suspected, even in death, Rees was going to be a cause of difficulty to him. But the last thing he’d wanted was to show any emotion to May.
‘I’ve got DI Cage on call,’ said May smartly.
‘No, you haven’t, I’ve got him up here with me. I’ve just sent him down to Bristol,’ said Harker wearily, trying to hide from May his sudden preoccupation with news of Rees’s death.
May looked at his screen. ‘Then next on the list is DI Temple. I’ll ring him,’ he said.
‘No,’ came the immediate response from Harker, jolted out of preoccupied thoughts. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll see to it.’ Harker cut May off the line and dialled the assistant chief constable.
May knew that Harker’s choices were limited. Like all forces, budget cuts and endless reorganization had changed the landscape. Chief Officers and their accountants deployed a maverick, myopic ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ style of operational policing that created disillusionment and was no longer sustainable. The thin blue line had become so thin that within weeks, retired officers were being sent letters asking them to return on a contract basis for half the pay they had previously received. Unsurprisingly, the take up rate was low.
May had little time for chief officers. His federation role exposed him to the wider issues. Policing on the cheap was nothing new, but chief constables making the decisions were on the same salaries as the Prime Minister and with their millionaire pensions, their next steps were typically retirement. With salaries and allowances cut for the ranks, the gulf between the chiefs and their subordinates was growing ever wider and he blamed them for the pressures his colleagues felt.
Policing was in a bad way with forty-three forces and forty-three chief constables, their expensive entourages and accountants all doing things in forty-three different ways. May often wondered how one job could illicit forty-three different responses from so called professionals at the top of policing. Why couldn’t they agree on a consensus approach, amalgamate and reduce their numbers? It wasn’t hard to do the maths; they’d done it in Scotland, merged six forces to one. Working on the same ratio you could reduce forty-three forces to just seven for England and Wales, saving an absolute fortune. No, like turkeys voting for Christmas, they would rather see staff placed under enormous pressure than give up their forty-three fiefdoms. May knew that forces ran in spite of chief officers, not because of them. No wonder, thought May, there was institutional constipation.
May knew this backdrop created a well of distrust and paranoia. Mired in internal politics, the force ran on rumours, gossip of power struggles, in-fighting, U-turns, wrong turns and back-stabbing, which ratcheted through the ranks, corridors, offices and gradually filtered down to parade rooms and canteens, where it was routinely scrutinized, embellished and lampooned. As senior officers jostled for influence, any two good decisions would be undone by five bad ones. Amongst all this had been the rumours of in-fighting regarding Harker and Rees. May also knew mentioning DI Temple would be an anathema to Harker – particularly hearing about Gemma only hours before.
The canteen had long chewed the story of the night Detective Inspector Harker had entered his lounge to discover Temple, then an off-duty probationer, reclined on his cream leather sofa with his fingers entwined in his 19-year-old daughter Gemma’s hair, her head firmly buried in his groin. Temple also dodged the punch Harker had thrown at him that night, the force of which smashed into the side of Gemma’s face.
It hadn’t just been Gemma’s jaw that shattered that evening. Her relationship with her parents was smashed to smithereens by Harker’s punch. In tit-for-tat retaliation, she heaped humiliation on her father as she insisted he was arrested for serious assault. She’d fallen head over heels for Temple and Harker, in his angry possessiveness, threatened him with losing his job if he saw Gemma again. As the charge was dropped and Temple heeded Harker’s words, she went missing. When she returned months later, she exiled herself from her parents for the streets of Swindon and a vortex of petty crime to feed her new heroin habit.
After half an hour, May’s phone rang. It was Harker.
‘Contact Temple and get him over to Ramsbury, just until I can get more of the Major Crime Unit over there.’ Harker rang off.
CHAPTER 3
AT THE SUDDEN noise in the room, Temple’s hand instinctively reached across the bed to the gun; even in his half sleep, his fingers folded themselves around the grip of the wooden handle and rested on the groove of the trigger.
In a split second of recognition, he realized where the sound came from. As if to stifle a woman’s scream, his cupped hand moved from the gun to the mobile. In his urgency to stop the noise, he knocked over a wine glass on the table next to him, breaking the glass and spilling its residue.
Bob May told him he was to come on duty earlier than his scheduled evening shift.
‘All hell’s breaking loose here and Chris Rees died from a heart attack this morning.’
Temple was suddenly wide-eyed from the dim fog of sleep. Did he hear that right?
‘What did you say?’
May repeated the message. The news of the death of his colleague punched Temple to the pit of his stomach. He had worked with Rees over the years; he was a good detective on the MCU (Major Crime Unit) and had sympathized with Temple when Harker recently blocked his move to the team.
‘And you’re going to be bitching for Harker, there’s a murder over at Ramsbury. He wants you to deal – now,’ May said.
As May read out the details of the log, Temple’s thumb and forefinger manipulated his eyelids to concentrate on the information. When May finished the call, Temple slumped back into his pillow.
He thought of Chris Rees and the help and support Rees had given him over the years. He wasn’t like the rest – Rees didn’t fawn and lick up to senior officers and yet he was able to engage with them, making him more genuine. The mention of Harker forced Temple to remember that before he died, Rees had advised Temple to transfer to another force. The early run-in with Harker over Gemma had cast a long shadow over Temple’s career. The only reason Temple had reached the rank of inspector was due to Harker being on secondment for three years and since then, Harker had practically held him in a head lock. Transferring was a good idea, but Temple had another reason for staying. It had become a physical need. It was the reason he joined the job in the first place and what drove him on.
The sharp cool rays of the May morning sun cut through the cheap material of the curtains at the window, obscuring the pattern to give a half-light to the room. Temple’s clothes were scattered on the bare boarded floor where he’d stepped out of them. The air smelt stale and his eyes were drawn to the broken wine glass and spilt contents on the bedside table. A thin red line had dribbled its way across the cream thick cream-coloured paper of a solicitor’s letter. He stood the glass upright and with the back of his hand, pushed a broken shard across the paper. A red smear now appeared across the large black printed heading of his wife’s name.
He could do without a murder investigation. His domestic problems needed a plan that meant full on commitment for the next week but the phone call had now rendered that impossible.
He took the letter in his hand. It had lain on the doormat when he came home last night. He read the words through a red circle stamped by the base of the glass. The same dark wine stain was on his lips and as he moistened them, wincing at the dog shit smell of his own breath, he read again of his wife’s intentions to divorce him for adultery.
Not for the first time he drew parallels with mistakes he’d made in the past and those he continued to make. It was as if a fault line had embedded itself into his life, causing him to screw up at regular intervals. He felt as if he was in a constant battle to subdue the unrelenting destructive power the past seemed to have on his life. “Moving on”, they called it now; he needed to move on. But he couldn’t. If he could just discover the truth, he could bring himself peace.
As he read the letter, he knew he couldn’t give up on his wife Leigh. It was in his nature to screw up but it wasn’t in his nature to give up. He figured a psychologist would make sense of this and the reasons he took unnecessary risks.
In a bid to understand him, Leigh had suggested that his behaviour was all wrapped up in ‘survivor syndrome’. That his infidelities were perhaps a subconscious Oedipus complex, not an idea Temple was especially keen on, but he’d complimented her on her attempt at reverse psychology on him.
He loved Leigh; she understood him and he needed her for that alone. She was his best friend, lover, or at least, had been. And they had their daughter, Daisy. But she’d run out of patience following his denials regarding a female who rang asking for him in a series of phone calls to the house. He had no idea who the woman was, but seven months ago, Leigh threw him out. OK, he was no saint and it wasn’t the first time, or the second she’d had reason to throw him out. But a divorce was the last thing he wanted, especially for something as far as he was concerned, he hadn’t done. She’d upped the ante this time, though and gone further; moved a boyfriend in. Into the house they had shared, the house he still paid the mortgage on. Into the house where he should be, their home.
Temple took hold of the gun and momentarily felt its weight in his hand. It was a French Chamelot-Delvigne double action officer’s revolver from 1874. As a child, Temple had listened avidly to his grandfather as he told the story of how he had been given the gun by a brave female resistance worker in WWII following the liberation of Ghent in 1944. He opened the drawer in the table and put the gun inside next to a packet of sleeping pills. Before closing the drawer, he hesitated; should he take the gun with him after all? Temple had trouble of another kind and right now he’d kill if he had to. He shut the drawer.
CHAPTER 4
RAMSBURY SITS ON the east side of Wiltshire, situated alongside the River Kennet. In what estate agents termed ‘desirable commuter land’, residents travelled to work in London and Reading on the Great Western line from nearby Great Bedwyn or Pewsey, or dashed along the M4. Typical of fodder for Sunday supplements, it was the prime example of country life; a self-contained village community, where people rubbed both their monied and benefit-receiving shoulders in its two pubs and the village shop. A school and ancient church completed the perfect pastoral package.
Temple drove on through the High Street. He hadn’t been to Ramsbury for years, but he could see it had changed little. At the sight of The Yew Tree public house, his mind recalled the two or three visits here with his archaeologist uncle, Richard, as a boy. His uncle had taken him to the restoration of a Roman mosaic at nearby Littlecote Manor. One of the finest in the country, Temple now remembered how his uncle explained the meaning of the pattern to him and the tale of Orpheus. They were as good as strangers then, but due to Richard’s persistence, they
became friends. So much so, Richard took him everywhere with him, on archaeological digs and surveys around the county. Surprised at his remembrance of these events, his thoughts were suddenly broken as a horse and rider appeared from his right, forcing him to brake sharply.
Temple continued and bore left at The Phoenix into Oxford Street and through to the Whittonditch Road, looking for Wedwellow House. As he followed on through the village, Temple observed a smattering of social housing amongst the rest of the newly built semis and large detached houses of the wealthy and older terraced cottages. He continued to drive on, slower now, so that he could see the names of the houses.
Usually, circumstances dictated a sizeable circus of police vans and cars at the scene of a murder, but as Temple drew alongside a high brick wall where the house name was carved in stone, he could see only two police vehicles, one a large marked CSI van and a white Honda. Turning his car through a pair of open wooden gates, Temple was approached by a young uniformed officer. Temple didn’t recognize him and took out his warrant card to identify himself to the officer who had leant down to register Temple’s face. Waved on, he drove slowly, the wheels of his car crunching across a neat pea gravel drive.
He parked beside the police cars and recognized one of the two white paper suited CSIs coming out of the house as Jackie Newly. He looked at the house; E-shaped and detached, it was a substantial pile of Victorian red brick with a new and expensive looking wing extending to the right of a heavy oak door.
Standing in the open doorway, his white forensic suit straining to contain his bulk, Temple recognized DS Simon Sloper.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Temple under his breath, instantly on the defensive. Temple knew Sloper was a friend of Harker’s from way back. His well-honed paranoia told him that Sloper would be reporting back to Harker every decision he made.