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Praise for The Note
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The story was gripping, the emotional turmoil facing Eddie was palpable throughout. You felt the tense nervousness gripping him over the few short hours the story covers. The dialogue is believable, clear, without affectations and not contrived.
A new master's in Thriller Town and he's here to stay. A pulse-quickening, brain-teasing adventure. Thriller writing doesn’t get any better than this.
Eddie quickly becomes a friend, someone who you listen to and understand - someone to trust.
The Note and The Lift do not feel like short stories. They are carefully crafted glimpses into the unique world of Eddie Collins.
This is a fast paced, hard to put down story. It kept me up late into the night as I needed to see the outcome.
Sarcasm and black humour, action aplenty, this is a winner.
Power-packed, explosive introduction to Eddie Collins.
Andrew Barrett writes with a word paint brush and really takes you into the story he's painting! This one is dark, claustrophobic, exciting, startling, with flashes of humour and a surprise ending which I didn't see coming.
What a gripping read I loved it.
I felt I was actually there with Eddie, although he didn’t listen to me when I told him to RUN.
Great short story full of action and suspense.
Will definitely read the full stories of CSI Collins
Every time you think you have something figured out you are so wrong. If this were a movie you would be at the edge of your seat.
I loved this Eddie story and I want his dictionary!
Eddie says and thinks what we would like to say and do.
Eddie’s frustration with Officer 'Dibble' is a joy, I love his sarcasm. A brilliant story with an extra twist at the end that I did not anticipate.
If you like a little shiver, and the hairs standing up on the back of your neck, you can't go wrong here!
Throughout the story the suspense is ratcheted up, until it is almost palpable, and only relieved by Eddie's irreverence and (nervous) wisecracks. I really like the Eddie character, he is human and believable and has a healthy dose of mistrust for authority,
I love Eddie Collins. He is one of my favourite characters and I do struggle with the idea that he's not real.
There is a lot of dark humour in this which had me laughing aloud.
If you're looking for a short story that grips you from the first page....look no more, you've found it.
The Note is jam packed with drama, hard hitting and often brutal scenes, twists and turns abound make this a highly charged story.
The Note is a tautly-plotted short story, revelatory of CSI work, and a revealing look at abnormal psychology.
The Note
A CSI Eddie Collins short story
by
Andrew Barrett
© 2017
— The Scene —
Do you ever have that feeling of being watched, and when you turn around, no one’s there? Spooky, isn’t it? It happened to me tonight, and I wish I’d taken more notice; I wish I’d looked harder.
I was working a half-night shift. That means I start work at 6pm and go home around 2am. I say ‘around’ because often I’ll be late off – this is the police, after all. Working as a CSI in Leeds means there’s plenty to keep me occupied on this shift.
My Control Room sent me to a scene in some pub car park in the shittiest end of Leeds that was so dilapidated it made Beirut look like Chelsea. And despite the rain, I would be the entertainment to a group of toothless drunken men for two and a half hours.
They kept going inside for a fresh beer and coming back out to watch me again, maybe hoping I’d done something wonderful like pull a murderer out of a top hat, or found their missing teeth. Christ, didn’t these people have lives? I suppose if they did, they’d be living them, right? Arseholes.
Anyway, the scene consisted of a dead guy who was curled into a foetal position about a yard from the pub’s gable-end wall, which was good really because it offered a bit of protection from the rain. Near to him was a length of scaffolding pole, and draining from the flap in his scalp was a pool of blood the size of a welcome mat.
The paramedics had pronounced life extinct, and were just wrapping up; their green uniforms dark and shiny because of the rain. You could see in their eyes that they just wanted to be away now they’d done their bit. And on a night like this who could blame them?
The only copper there seemed surprised to see me. He explained that when this incident happened none of the pissheads were in the car park. So details were sketchy at best, but it seemed that this guy had walked from the pub and some lowlife had jumped him. Couldn’t see yet if he still had his wallet on him, so I couldn’t rule robbery out.
And actually it wouldn’t surprise me if one of those giggling pissheads over there was the killer, just watching me, proud of his handiwork, maybe wondering if I was smart enough to pull him out of the hat! The copper had a brief word with the PCSO on the tape and then waltzed off inside the pub, pulling out his pocket notebook as he went.
Judging by CIDs lack of presence, they obviously weren’t keen to come out and play on account of the rainwater would dissolve them, I guess. They were probably playing cards back in the nick where it was warm and dry: loser gets to brave the rain and take statements from the drunken soup-drinkers.
So I had a scene rapidly being washed away, a gawping, shouting mob standing behind a piece of thin blue and white tape less than ten yards away. I also had a young PCSO trying to keep them on the far side of it without getting drunk on their breath or being vomited on. I did say it was the shittiest part of Leeds.
I too was anxious to be away, but I was determined to do a thorough job. I wanted to make sure I’d done everything I could do to catch the bastard and help the victim’s family get justice.
That must sound like public relations bullshit to you, but you should know I don’t do PR – we have a department for that. I just do the best I can, that’s all the PR I give. I’m also paid to do the best job I can, and doing anything less would be theft, really. And I’m not a thief.
And I expect it sounds like a back-covering exercise too, but it really isn’t. This job, shit though it is sometimes, is there to help victims of crime – whether those victims are themselves innocent or not. Either way, this guy might have kids, and they’d have to grow up knowing their dad was murdered and the killer was still free, that the police had failed them.
So I was prepared to get wet and listen to drunken renditions of Who Are You? I was prepared to do the job right. It’s a process. And you could either follow it and capture everything that was there to capture, or you could just flit around looking for the obvious and miss the more subtle clues entirely. That’s the difference between a good examiner doing a good job and a shit examiner pretending to do a good job.
Things like the scaffolding pole leap out at you; they’re obvious and yes, they could lead to an offender very quickly. But overlook something like offender’s blood on the victim, offender’s hair on the victim, offender’s footwear marks in the victim’s blood, and you suddenly become reliant upon that scaffolding pole giving you the answer.
On a job like this one, the investigators rely on forensic evidence to get them ahead in the game. There’s only forensic evidence and circumstantial evidence at play here, seeing as there are no witnesses. And if I miss the forensic evidence, there’s no suspect. Game over.
The PCSO at the cordon looked around at me as I set up my camera, and shouted the w
ords everyone who’s trying to concentrate loves to hear, “How long are you going to be?”
This angered me almost as much as the rainwater trickling down the back of my neck. “Piece of string,” I said.
And that insignificant exchange seemed to be the trigger for a drunken arsehole to get his two-penn’orth in and rise in the ranks of arseholedom. “Gill Grissom would’ve caught the bastard by now.” His drinking companions thought this was hysterical. I didn’t. But I ignored them and got on with taking the initial scene shots with a few yellow markers laid out next to those pertinent bits of evidence. I wanted to get to the body as quickly as I could, but you can’t ignore the preliminary things.
And one of those preliminary things included getting a tent up over the deceased as quickly as possible. If you’ve ever put up a marquee in your back garden, you’ll know it’s almost impossible to do by yourself, so I was hoping that CID had finished playing cards by now, or some backup for the PCSO and the copper might show up before this place succumbed to a drunken uprising or my corpse floated off down the street.
Once I’d taken the initial photos, I couldn’t resist a quick peep at the body, just in case there was that stray hair lying in a vulnerable place that even a small breeze could carry off. I squatted at the dead man’s side and glided the torchlight over him.
He was only a few feet from the pub wall, and about as far from a broken fence too. Beyond the fence and growing through it were nettles and bracken that had trapped fast-food wrappers, empty beer cans, and masses of cigarette ends. I could have used a cigarette myself, but I resisted the urge, keen to get on with the job.
The slugs appeared from nowhere, dozens of them, unable to resist their urge to drink their fill of the dead man’s blood – I’d known those little bastards ruin blood spatter patterns before now. And even though there was no danger of that here – it was just a lake, no patterns – I couldn’t help but shudder at the sight of them, so I went back to studying the dead man.
There was nothing remarkable about him: he was mid-thirties, white, short dark hair (now very red towards the back), wearing old jeans, a green t-shirt, and a fleece. His eyes were open, and death had gifted that familiar opacity like he had a bad case of cataracts, and the rain had clumped his eye lashes together. The whole mess of his face gave me a strange sensation.
I recognised him from somewhere.
Making out his facial features was a pain because of all the blood from a second wound across his cheek, but I recognised the crucifix earring and the mobster moustache. When I stood up, I also recognised the red Nike trainers he’d been wearing when I saw him last.
And that’s when things turned sour.
A plain car pulled up outside the pub and the longcoats got out. CID. These are the coppers who chase clichés. They’re the ones who see what a detective looks like on the telly and try to imitate them, creating a fake image from a fake image. A counterfeit counterfeit, a self-perpetuating caricature. They’re plastic, and I could tell by the way they swaggered over to me that they were thinking of their image for the crowd.
Like Morse and Lewis they ducked under the tape and nodded as they approached; the temperature dropped by ten degrees just because they were so fucking cool. I gritted my teeth, and stopped work again. It was difficult to tell who they were to begin with, with their collars pulled up against the drizzle, but my heart sank as I saw him.
“DS Trafford,” he said to the PCSO, a little too loudly, and then looked at his audience, hoping to soak up some wows or oohs. Only mockery was forthcoming. He looked like a bad drawing of Officer Dibble. I didn’t like him. Never had. For six months or more he’d worked the same shift pattern as I did, and each time he came to a job of mine I would sigh because he wasn’t off sick or hadn’t been demoted to tuck shop attendant.
I didn’t recognise his buddy, but judging by the matching longcoat he was obviously emulating Dibble in the hope of scoring Brownie points. Creep. Dibble didn’t introduce me to him, but he was short, face like a bashed crab.
I don’t like strangers showing up at my scenes. I said to Dibble, “You lost at snap, then?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Never mind.”
“We’re locking it down. Tent it and you can go.”
“What?” I admit that I was a bit flabbergasted by this, but refused to let someone I didn’t like mess me around at a scene that warranted a decent job. “My scene. I’m working it.” The crowd was getting drunker, louder, just a confusion of noise that chipped away at the edges. “You don’t want a scene on overnight with that lot hanging around.”
Dibble wasn’t accustomed to being challenged; you could tell that by his face, how it screwed up as though his tongue had turned into a lemon. I think he was expecting me to say ‘Oh gee, thanks’, and wheel-spin my way back to the nick.
“We’re locking it down till daylight.”
I had no intention of locking it down. There were things that needed doing tonight, and if he wanted to leave the stiff there until daylight and give the slugs a real feast, then fine, he could have it. But I was going to tent it and process the rest of the scene.
And I even knew who the dead guy was!
It’s every DS’s dream to have an identity to work with right from the off, but there was more chance of him finding a personality in a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes than he had of me giving him that piece of good news. Let the prick try to get it out of this rabble, and see how far he gets.
His idea was to come here, look cool as he fired off a few orders, take a couple of statements and then prepare a briefing pack for the poor bastards who had to work it the next day. Like I said, you only need to lose evidence once and you’ve got a murderer skipping down the beach singing Oh What a Beautiful Morning. “Just a minute,” I stepped even closer, not in a confrontational kind of way, just trying to keep my voice down a bit, “You give me a hand to tent it, and then you can go and take your statements and avoid whatever else needs doing. Leave the rest to me.”
“Goodbye.” Dibble and Bashed-Crab turned and walked towards the PCSO.
I stood there like a prick, like a kid who’d just had his sandwiches taken off him by a bully. I felt more than a little embarrassed, but that feeling was a pebble compared to the mountain of anger that crashed over me. “Oi, Dibble!”
They both stopped in unison, and turned to face me. It was almost graceful. The crowd quietened, the way people do when they sense an atmosphere, something untoward developing.
“Ayup, Quincy’s in a mood.” The newly crowned King of Arseholedom began laughing at his own joke, and soon the rest were laughing along with him, like it was a toothless grin parade at a hick festival.
“Quincy,” I shouted, “is a fucking pathologist, you prick.”
The crowd jeered, and then Dibble was in my face, close enough so I could see the flecks of rain landing on his perfectly trimmed eyebrows. “What did you say?”
“Quincy. He’s a pathologist.”
“What is your name?”
I looked at him, and confusion somehow dissipated my anger. This wasn’t a friendly ‘what do they call you?’ question; this was an ‘I need your name for the complaint I’m about to file’ question. “My name?”
“I have dismissed you from the scene, and you have seen fit to stir the crowd with a derisive comment.”
“How often have we worked scenes together, and you don’t know my name?” I looked at Bashed-Crab, “Is he serious?”
Dibble answered for him. “Last time of asking. What is your name?”
I cleared my throat, he was serious. “Bill,” I said. “Bill Gristle.”
He actually took out a notebook and a pencil and wrote it down. “Thank you, Bill,” he said, nodding towards the body. “You can tent it and go.”
The disbelief in Bashed-Crab’s eyes was a delight. He nudged Dibble, and then whispered something. I stood there with my arms folded and a grin on m
y face as realisation grew on his. Dibble looked pissed off and took a small step up to me. “Funny man, eh? I will be taking this further.” He gritted his teeth and spoke through them, “Stop fucking about and do as I say or things will get messy for you.”
Oops. Threats and me never really got on too well, and I took a small step forward too, just enough to bring my boot gently down on his patent leather toe and prevent him from reversing. I brought my face down to his level, curled his beautiful silk tie into my fist, and growled, “You wanna put in a complaint because I refuse to compromise evidence? Fine, go ahead, I’ll argue all day long with your Inspector. But threaten me again and I’ll punch your slimy brown tongue so far down your throat you’ll be able to taste your own fear. Got it?”
“Get your fucking—”
“And I don’t care for rank either, so try pulling that shit on me and see how far it gets you. Now get out of my scene.” The crowd was almost silent, even the PCSO was looking, and I could see Bashed-Crab cringe as he studied the raindrops on his shiny shoes.
Dibble attempted and failed to straighten his tie, and even from here I could feel the heat burning on his flushed cheeks. “You haven’t heard the last of this.”
See what I mean about Mr Cliché?
I smiled, and mouthed ‘fuck off’. He did, and the crowd parted as the red-faced man with the crumpled tie barged his way through.
Ten minutes later a police van with two coppers on board pulled up, and I enlisted their help in erecting the scene tent and positioning it over the body. Now I was happy.
Bashed-Crab and Dibble had either gone or they were still in the pub regaining their composure by taking statements and ordering drunks around. The crowd had thinned considerably, and the PCSO hadn’t muttered a word to me. Bliss. Now I could get on with the job.
— The Note —
I got back to the office and dumped a shitload of exhibits – including his wallet – on my desk. My back ached and I was wet through. But I could relax in the knowledge that I had done my job, and I had helped the investigators with things that might otherwise have been lost when the day shift came on. I made sure that little snippet went into the report – now that’s watching your back!
The Note: A CSI Eddie Collins short story Page 1