A Long Time Dead (The Dead Trilogy)

by Andrew Barrett

  “Not a problem.”

  The light stroked her hand. The ink they had all seen yesterday with their naked eyes was even more discernible, appeared refined.

  “Looks like…I don’t know,” Peter spoke his words slowly, concentrating on the light source, “Looks a bit like …‘R’? Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Can’t really make it out, do it again.”

  Peter did, and this time, he could see it quite clearly. The ink had penetrated the epidermis. The strength of the light permeating her skin reflected off the ink a slightly modified colour, giving contrast and clarity.

  Chris studied the ink, came closer, close enough to feel the coolness of her skin against his own hot face. “Yeah, I see it now. Do you think that might be an ‘o’ next…or maybe an ‘a’, lower case?”

  “An ‘o’, I’d say. Though I’m not totally sure.”

  “How about we try a different filter?”

  “Yep, I’ll go with that.”

  Another two changes of filter finally convinced Peter that he was seeing was an ‘o’, after all. They then identified the following letter, a ‘g’.

  They photographed her hand again, using ultra violet-sensitive film and a non-reflective sticky scale. A further thirty minutes of playing revealed four numbers of what could have been, according to Peter, a telephone number. They photographed the numbers in the same fashion with Chris teasing the light source around them as Peter struggled with the tripod’s position. The rest of the numbers were indiscernible smears.

  “Shelby will be well chuffed with this,” Chris said.

  Ann turned the lights back on and everyone blinked away the dazzle, stuffing the goggles back into a plastic bag.

  “Good. I like it when you’re in the thick of it, you know, when an investigation like this can leap forward three of four hefty places because of the information you’ve supplied to it.”

  “How long before we have the positives?”

  Peter rolled up the mains flex and shut the portable machine inside an aluminium case. “I should be able to have them on your desk…” he looked at his watch, “by three.”

  “Excellent!” Chris had made a mental note of the findings, but confirmation by photograph would reassure Shelby. And that was all that mattered.

  Chris set off back to the office, hoping against hope that Roger would come good with the three hundred. Quickly.

  Chapter Twenty

  — One —

  Bell opened the file marked ‘Departmental Promotions’ and scanned the preliminary pages before turning to the back and reading his summary of each player’s performance, right from the application form stage, through the aptitude tests and the interview, all the way to here: acting up.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he rubbed his chin, slid his spectacles back up his nose and returned to the first page. Even now, after all the necessary ‘evidence’ was in, he had trouble making up his mind whom to appoint. It was a close call between both of them: Conniston and Hutchinson.

  He gazed out through the blind and into the hibernating gardens that ambled gracefully along the HQ building on Laburnum Road. Directly below his first floor window, a small fountain trickled water into an overflowing stone bowl, though the incessant wind blew much of it away in a spray. Speckles of rain landing on the window distorted the view.

  Bell liked Conniston, liked the way he performed at jobs and especially liked the reports he had accrued from Senior Officers and, ironically, from Hutchinson too. But something niggled him. He knew that Conniston’s approach to discipline was softer than his own, and certainly more lenient than Hutchinson’s. But Conniston loved the job, and that counted for a lot.

  And, having considered all that, Bell was reluctant to pass such a responsibility onto Hutchinson for no other reason than the man was arrogant enough to consider himself a natural choice. Bell turned away from the fountain, retook his seat and searched the two names again, hoping for a clear answer to the dilemma.

  Conniston had something even more persuasive in his arsenal than did Hutchinson. He had integrity and honesty. And of course, there was Hutchinson’s inability to control his fiscal affairs. But in Hutchinson’s favour were the years of experience, a sound understanding of technical processes and an undeniable authority figure that new-starters and wayward old-timers would take seriously.

  Hopefully the answer would come soon, in less than an hour.

  — Two —

  Roger signed off the CIS computer and sat there staring at the screen wondering what made Chris so damned jumpy, so damned insistent he came to the Bridgestock scene. His shoes were still damp, and they made him shudder as he put them back on. He just towel dried his hands and mopped up the water that had squeezed out from the laces, when the phone rang. “Conniston of Wood Street,” he said on autopilot.

  “Roger,” said Denis Bell. “Roger, are you there?”

  “Yes, yes, Mr Bell, sorry, I was miles away.”

  “To be expected if you’ve been on duty since six.”

  “I’ve had a pretty—”

  “What happened on your night week? I’ve had Inspector Weston complaining about something of which he thinks I should be aware.”

  Roger slumped back into his chair and squeezed his eyes closed. “Yes, Mr Bell, I can explain.”

  “Good. I am glad to hear it. You’re off duty in twenty minutes. Come and see me now.”

  “Now?”

  “What I have to say won’t wait until tomorrow, I’m afraid.”

  He needed to get home for Yvonne, and then he remembered he and Lenny had a squash court booked. The two mixed in his mind as he fought for the excuse to give Mr Bell, and all he could think of saying was, “But I’ve got squash in an hour.” And then he shook his head, couldn’t believe he just said that.

  “Never mind squash! I want you standing before my desk in fifteen minutes – get an escort if need be!” He hung up.

  Roger abandoned the paperwork and the accumulated exhibits, picked up his old jacket for the wash, and squelched out of the office, chin resting on his chest. On the way over to HQ, he fastened the top button on his shirt and tweaked his tie into place.

  — Three —

  Denis Bell laid his gold-rimmed spectacles carefully on his leather bound desk blotter. “Chris tells me that your wife is in a certain amount of distress.”

  “He does?”

  “He inferred that this could explain your absence from the office around midnight.”

  “Yvonne has arthritis. It comes and goes in waves, changes as often as the damned weather. But lately her knees are inflamed and her ankles are beginning to twist inwards slightly.” He tried to smooth down his tuft of hair, feeling suddenly self-conscious.

  “I can sympathise,” Bell said. “Both my parents suffered with it until they passed away. It’s a debilitating disease.” He studied his desk blotter for a moment, as though thinking of the past. Then he said, “So am I to take it that your unannounced absence was due to unforeseen family circumstances?” He raised an eyebrow, almost prompting Roger to agree.

  He did, despite telling Weston that he was ill. “Yes, that’s right, Mr Bell. I had to go—”

  Bell palmed away Roger’s words, picked up his fountain pen and scribbled on a sickness form. “You don’t have to explain; I just need something to shut Weston up. Weston is a man devoted to paperwork and procedures. The more the better, I think; he wakes up on page one and only goes to bed when he has reached the end of the chapter. Do you follow me?”

  “Yes,” he mumbled, “I think so.”

  “Right, we’ll say no more on that, then.” He completed the form without another word. “How long have you worked for us, Roger?”

  “About nine years. Ten in another three months or so.”

  “Do you feel that you’ve gained knowledge of a wide diversity of crime scenes?”

  “I’ve handled everything from RTAs, arson, rape, to murder and suicide…” he wondered what Bell was fishing for. �
��I suppose I’ve done almost everything a SOCO could expect to encounter, except a bomb scene, and SO13 would deal with that anyway. But,” he quickly pointed out, “that doesn’t mean I’m perfect, and it doesn’t mean I’m not still learning, because I am – willing to learn, that is. If you stand still in this profession, then you’re going backwards. Look at DNA,” he enthused, “when I started, they were only getting partials from large crime stains using Quad profiling, now with SGM they can get full profiles from next to nothing, with a probability of one in fifty-million!”

  Bell leaned back in his char, didn’t stop Roger displaying his passion for the art and craft of the profession; he was enjoying the sight of someone still excited by it.

  “How would you feel if I appointed Chris Hutchinson as Supervisor at Wood Street?”

  Roger took a moment to think. He said, “Fine. I don’t have a problem working with anyone, Mr Bell. We get along well anyway.” He wondered where this was leading. “If you chose him,” he continued, “then he must be right for the job.”

  “Conversely, how would you feel if I chose you?”

  “Delighted,” he said immediately, and then followed it after a moment’s consideration with, “But I’d need some help with office management from other Supervisors. Lanky ran the office without letting anyone else help, so I’d need guidance.”

  “How do you think Chris would react?”

  He’d blow a gasket, thought Roger. “Ah, the big question,” he said. “I don’t think he’d be too impressed. He thinks it’s his already— sorry, that’s just the impression I get. But I would hope he’d come around to the idea. I’m not an ogre, after all.”

  “Are you listening carefully, Roger?”

  “Yes, Mr Bell.”

  “Roger,” he said. “Call me Denis.”

  — Four —

  Roger closed the back door and let the wind and the rain and the outside world dissolve. He had a grin across his face that made his cheeks ache, and he savoured the moment. He placed his old jacket in the utility room and customarily waved two fingers at Weston’s photograph.

  Yvonne stared at him with a mixture of surprise and curiosity in her eyes.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I see you beat Lenny at squash again.”

  He didn’t correct her, merely widened his grin. “Is your knee okay now?”

  “Roger, what’s happened?”

  Roger kicked his damp shoes off and swaggered through into the lounge where Yvonne sat before her needlework, lengths of cotton draped across her lap.

  “We’re going out for dinner tonight,” he said.

  She put down her needle, turned in the chair and paid him more attention. “Are you going to tell me—”

  “Did you remember to take your tablets?”

  “For God’s sake!”

  Roger sat in the chair opposite her and rubbed his nails on his waistcoat, a look of exaggerated pride smeared across his face.

  Yvonne’s mouth fell open. “You got it, didn’t you?”

  He nodded and began to laugh.

  Yvonne screamed with delight, and then put her hands over her mouth while she briefly pondered the news. News duly pondered, she shrieked again and waved her arms in the air. “Come here,” she called, “come here, you… you… Oh, just come here!”

  * * *

  Never had a meal tasted so good, but never had Roger wanted so much to be home. And when they came home, they shared a glass or two of champagne. “Are you proud of me now, Yvonne?”

  She put her glass down and hugged him tightly. “Did you ever doubt it? But I hope you didn’t do this for me, Roger; hope you did it for yourself.”

  He nodded. “I did it for both of us.”

  “What about Chris?” Yvonne asked.

  “Nope, I didn’t do it for Chris.”

  She prodded his chest, “You know what I mean. He’s going to be distraught.”

  “Denis is going to sort it. I think he’s having a meeting with him sometime tomorrow evening after Chris has finished with this murder he’s working on.”

  “Oh, the Bridgestock girl? How’s it going, anyone in the traps yet?”

  Roger shrugged. “Not a clue; no one’s spoken a word of it, which means they haven’t a clue either.”

  “Hey,” she said, “we’ll have to get you a new waistcoat now you’re a manager.”

  “I like my old one just fine. Don’t want to change a thing. Though the idea of a pocket watch sounds good.”

  “You old man.” She snuggled into the space between his neck and his shoulder. “Bet you can’t wait to tell your family, can you?”

  He thought about it, and then said, “They don’t need to know.”

  “I love you,” she whispered, playing with his mop of hair.

  Friday 22nd January 1999

  Chapter Twenty One

  — One —

  Despite his tiptoeing down the stairs and the obvious care he took in closing the noisy back door, she still heard him go when the car pulled off the drive. Yvonne pulled back the bedclothes.

  Her head ached from last night’s celebrating. She smiled as she remembered his proud swagger. Yes, last night was good, and she thought of it as the first step she had to take in trusting him again. It would be a long time, she supposed, before things ever got back to how they used to be, before she could feel him crawl into the bed beside her after a late shift and not wonder if he’d crawled into someone else’s bed earlier.

  * * *

  Once downstairs, Yvonne put the radio on and then put her makeup on. And after her daily exercises, she busied herself with the laundry, listening to the news. That’s when she found the key in Roger’s old jacket. He’d left it hanging over the director’s chair in the utility room ready for the wash. A routine pocket search located a couple of crumpled Mars bars and a hole in the lining. And when she poked her fingers through, they came back out holding a single key.

  The key meant nothing to her, but the fob was amusing. It was a little rubber man with a proud grin on his face and a massive erection held in his right hand. She threw the jacket into the machine and giggled at the little man in his erotic pose. Why would Roger have someone else’s key in his pocket; someone else’s house key? Then she stopped giggling and her face straightened; she remembered the news and the appeal they had made yesterday. The appeal for an unusual house key.

  — Two —

  Chris sat in Shelby’s hot office, fingers drumming on his knee, his mind at work praying that Captain Gemini won the 2.30 at Doncaster. This really was his last chance of staying pain free. Outside in the general CID office and across the hall in the Incident Room there was excited activity.

  He knew the investigation was beginning to wind down and that’s when things got like this: more people inside fretting about paperwork than outside making further enquiries and pulling the drawstrings of the investigation neatly together.

  This morning, he had come straight to the Incident Room to update Shelby with yesterday’s findings at the mortuary. Within minutes, the news had spread and the investigators’ fervour boiled.

  The door closed and Chris jumped. The noise from outside snapped away and Shelby stood in its place with an armful of folders. His complexion was a lot paler than recently, healthier, though his demeanour was sombre. He walked past Chris and dropped the folders on his considerably neater desk. “I’m processing Section 18 warrant paperwork, making sure it’s all in order. We don’t want to piss the magistrate off, eh?”

  Deflated, Chris looked away. He knew it wouldn’t be long before they asked him to leave the remainder of the investigation to them, and tell him not to discuss what he knew with anyone.

  “Have you anything else to add, then?” Shelby asked.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, anything—”

  “‘That may assist with your enquiries’?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You know the p
hone number might not even be his?”

  “You done the maths?”

  “What maths?”

  “The probability that a man named Rog has the same four digits in his phone number that Nicky Bridgestock had written on her hand?”

  “And you have?”

  “No. But you’re the statistician, you work it out.”

  Chris answered, blank-faced. “I can’t believe it.”

  “You can’t believe it? Think how I feel, I’ve never been so wrong about a person before. The whole station is on the back foot because of this. Fuck, I hate this job sometimes.”

  “The whole station doesn’t know about it yet.”

  “Stop being pedantic, Chris, you know what I mean.” Shelby slumped in his seat, rocked back in it and rubbed his eyes. “Wait till the fucking press get a hold of it. You’ve not seen shock till they get hold of it. You won’t be able to walk into your local store without hearing someone slating the police. And Chamberlain is spitting blood—”

  “Are you going to need a personal statement from me, you know, about his recent behaviour, his recent… misdemeanours?”

  Shelby raised his eyebrows. “It’s for CPS to decide, but I expect so, yeah. Anyway,” he said, “what misdemeanours?”

  “You can read it in the statement. It’s not something I want to gossip about.” He shook his head, looked past Shelby, and out of the window that framed a turbulent sky. “I just never suspected a thing.”

  “Look, I know it’s not easy for you; you’ve worked with him for years, and so have I, come to think of it.” Shelby pushed aside the files and the papers spilling from them, and leaned forward again, elbows resting on his desk. “It reminds me of the eighties when bad coppers were being pulled out by the scruff of their necks. Discipline & Complaints had never been so fucking busy with obs and court appearances, and they’d never been so hated by their own colleagues, because some of them were taking backhanders or turning a blind eye. Most of ‘em had done nothing wrong. Nothing.”