by Gavin Smith
“Who are you?” asked Slowey, now reclining on a wall seat inside the pub, a towel packed with ice on his head and a glass of water in front of him.
“Not much of a detective, are you? This is my pub and you’re the first cop to actually appear while it’s being screwed. So cheers.” The man raised a tumbler of whisky in Slowey’s direction.
Opposite the bar, both the one-armed bandit and the cigarette machine stood open, doors levered off, change and fags taken. Slowey traced the tender eggs swelling on his scalp, choked back bile and wandered if he’d sacrificed thousands of brain cells for a few hundred quid’s worth of nicotine.
“That’s not why I’m here,” he mumbled.
“Come again?”
A red light blinked from the ceiling above the optics, drawing Slowey’s gaze to the dull lens of a camera lurking in the cobwebs and coving.
“Does that camera work?”
“As far as I know. Bought one of those hard disk recorder drive things for it an’ all. The cheeky bastards took it. And judging by the bits of it I found in the car park, one of them brained you with it. Does that help?”
Blue lights flickered through the frosted windows and a diesel engine rumbled into the car park.
“Too early to say. Any chance of a short or is it past last orders?”
DI Ray Newbould and DCI Dave Brennan believed in a clearly defined rank structure. Brennan sat behind Newbould’s desk, jaw on steepled hands and double chin almost masking the small, tight knot of his tie. Newbould perched on the edge of his desk, one foot swinging, touching his tie pin or stroking an eyebrow when he wasn’t writing names on the white board in slow and precise block capitals.
Harkness had been allocated a wall seat barely two feet off the ground. Having finished his summing up, he gazed up at them from behind his knees, feeling like an overgrown schoolboy due his first caning. Next to him, with the patched elbow of his jacket occupying exactly half of the shared arm rest, sat DS Ron Biddle.
“Thanks for that summary, DS Harkness,” began Newbould at a brief nod from Brennan. “And congratulations on the promotion. Sounds like you’ve done a fair job tonight. I’ve got a few points to make. Do you want to start, sir?”
Brennan shook his head and shifted his gum from one side of his jaw to the other.
“Right then. As I said, Rob, great job tonight and we’d like you to stay at the sharp end of this enquiry.” He paused to allow Harkness to bask in the radiance of his smile. “Naturally, we’ll be setting up a HOLMES room ex post facto and working to the letter of the manual to get the right result first time every time. It’s only fair however to say that we do have one or two misgivings about the conduct of the enquiry to date thus far. Are we on the same page, Rob?”
“I think so, sir.” Harkness glanced at Biddle, who crossed his legs, sniffed and continued to stare at the white board.
“Good man.” Harkness caught a whiff of some peppery musk, a blend of brothel and municipal lavatory. It wasn’t Biddle, whose trademark tang of pipe tobacco and stale sweat was present and correct. Perhaps Newbould’s spray-on deodorant was being tested.
“Now then, top of the old agenda, crime scene integrity and health and safety. A little bird tells me that certain protocols vis a vis risk assessing a crime scene and not circumventing the rules for preserving the evidential integrity of said scene may not have been observed to the fullest letter of the manual.”
“Well, sir, it’s like this…”
“Relax, Rob, it’s not last cigarette time. And there’s more.”
“It’s like this, Rob,” began Brennan, cutting across Newbould, his South Yorkshire accent thickened by forty years of full tar, full fat and full pint glasses.
“You turn up half cut at a murder scene in your best pal’s personal car looking like you’ve coated yourself in glue and rolled around in a charity shop. Then you play at being a fireman, traipse around a delicate crime scene like you’re Clouseau and fart around with the dog squad while the golden hour ticks away.”
Harkness’s radio flashed and chimed, a personal message overriding the mute setting. He flushed, fumbled it from his belt clip, saw a collar number he didn’t recognise and blocked the call.
“Finished?” asked Brennan, index finger frozen in mid jab. “Good. Bloody technology. Now this is a bollocking, not a debate. I like you and you’re a bright boy, but you need to stop pissing about and realise you’re wearing bigger shoes now. In a second, I’ll ask you to say ‘yes, sir’, and when you say that, you’ll be agreeing that we’ll never have a conversation like this again.”
Brennan leaned across the desk and cocked an ear.
“Yes, sir,” said Harkness, exhaling slowly. He had a sudden urge to change his clothes and scour his skin, to erase the taint of the night that now clung to him, reeking.
“Right then,” said Brennan, leaning back and crossing his arms over his well rounded gut. “We’ve got some admin and media waffle to take care of while you two piss off and figure out how to find this bastard. Come back with a game plan when you’ve got one that might work.”
“Which two, sir?” said Harkness, dread transfixing his features like the shadow of a falling rock.
Biddle grinned and stuck out a hand, stray nasal hair twitching, lustrous and stiff as wire wool, as he exhaled with a snort that might have been laughter.
“Rob, looks like I’m tutoring you again,” said Biddle. “I bet you thought you’d seen the back of me, an’ all.”
Harkness nodded to the two bosses, both of whom ignored him, their attention fixed on the policy log, already up to five pages in Newbould’s flowery longhand. He led Biddle into the main office where the phone on his desk had just stopped ringing.
“Looks like someone was trying to get hold of you there, Rob. You always were a bit difficult to reach.”
Harkness gestured to a chair near his own. Biddle grinned, strolled past it, rotated the executive chair and lowered himself into it.
“I think you’ll find that’s my chair now, Ron,” said Harkness, voice as neutral as he could make it. “Some stains on there of sentimental value to me.”
“Sorry, Rob.” Biddle stood, hands raised in mock surrender. “Forgot how much you liked your own space. We can’t all be team players.”
Harkness dropped into his chair, tweaked a lever to change the incline by a millimetre or two and it was his again. He was conscious of the weariness seeping into his head like an anaesthetic, drawing in his horizons, blurring connections, making insight more and more difficult. His heart was thumping against his ribs and adrenaline wanted to make all the decisions; perhaps he should let it.
“Give me a clue then, Ron. Why have we been saddled with each other?”
“Steady on, Rob. Anyone might think you weren’t pleased to see your old mentor.”
Harkness drew in a deep breath and wished it was being filtered through a cigarette.
“You and your moods, Rob. Well, the boss heard there was some danger of you screwing this one up with your erratic working practices and asked me to come and lend you a guiding hand. I never mind a bit of OT and you know I’m fond of you, so I’m here to help.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Just think of me as the stabilisers on your new bike.”
“Not the wind beneath my wings?”
“I forgot how good you were at naming that tune.”
“Well, Ron,” said Harkness, propping his feet on the table after double-checking that the cleaner had left. “I haven’t forgotten much. While the office is empty and we’re both behaving like grown-ups, I should point out that I’m not happy to see you. You made my life miserable when I was too new and dumb to kick off about it. I’m still not sure why and I doubt you know yourself. Maybe it’s because I’m younger and prettier than you.
“Now, I know you and Brennan drink, play golf and do Lord knows what else together, which means I’m stuck with you. But if you go out of your way to botch this up for me, I’
ll walk off it and I’ll tell the boss why.”
“You’ve changed, Rob.” Biddle hooked a finger under his collar and pulled it away from his bobbing Adam’s apple. “Looks like you’ve grown a pair. I always thought you were harmless enough. Just a shame you never really joined the gang. Always hard to know whose side you’re on.”
“Right now, my own. Do you need more foreplay or should we crack on with a bit of work?”
Biddle had accepted the offer of a milky coffee, three sugars, but had insisted on counting out the exact price of 31 pence. Harkness had left his jacket and tie draped over his chair and slipped his mobile phone and a notebook into a pocket. He announced an urgent and potentially prolonged visit to the gents and left Biddle squinting at his spider’s web of notes.
Harkness descended to the basement, passing the armoury where a sharp crackle, a tang of ozone and a grunt of satisfaction suggested early turn traffic were testing their stun guns. He crossed the bare concrete floor, passing sleek, high performance traffic cars, battered, low performance patrol cars and barely legal, unmarked bangers reserved for low profile work and fast food runs. The keys had been left in the ignition of a badly mauled Mondeo on a ‘T’ plate. The windscreen was cracked, a wing mirror was missing and the tyres were almost slick. Harkness took the keys and pocketed them.
In a badly lit corner behind cars parked three deep, he found the overspill from the property officer’s store. Bicycles, jerry cans, lead cladding and copper cable were piled against each other in an area demarcated by a lavish leather suite seized as proceeds of crime from some well to do ne’er do well. Harkness flopped into his habitual thinking space, a lavish, four berth sofa which could accommodate him from head to toe without overhang. There must have been another seizure since he was last down here. The familiar aroma of diesel and leather was underlined by something sweet and pungent enough to make his eyes water and his fingers itch for a cigarette; a decent crop of cannabis, not sticks and seeds from the school gate.
He stretched his arms above his head, levered his back straight and felt the stiffness in his upper spine dissipate with a crack like a distant gunshot. He held the ecstasy of uncoiling pain on his lips as his eyelids fluttered shut. Peace and quiet, space to think, cool and comfortable, mind clear, ready to reassess, reorder, get a grip on things; the mantra might work better if his inner voice didn’t sound so much like a stage hypnotist at a working men’s club.
Had the arsonist really intended murder? How had they ensured the victims were under lock and key and behind the most secure double-glazing in the East Midlands before setting the blaze? If it was Murphy, could he really have murdered his own family in so calm and orderly a manner? Normally, there’d be intimate and bloody hatred involved in the killing of a loved one.
The fact that Murphy was missing didn’t automatically make him the suspect; he could be an undiscovered victim. If not Murphy, then who would hate him enough to stray into a nice area and attack his home and family? That kind of hatred didn’t spring from one drunken spat, it needed deep roots. A quick, drunken rumble in the saloon bar was too shallow a pretext, unless it flowed from something older. There must be a name in all that paper on his desk, a signpost, a reason. Perhaps Biddle would find it, if he could take a break from drafting a list of learning points.
His eyes closed again and with a protesting gasp he toppled into sleep.
He should have set his alarm as there was no time to sleep, no time to eat, no time to think and no time to get it wrong. A clock on the wall was encircled by gunpowder which flared and sputtered in time with the second hand. Something bright and noisy would happen when it got to twelve again, and even though the spark and the second hand were moving far too slowly, as if he had an ocean of time in which to rest, he knew he’d wake very soon in a spitting panic, brain even more addled than it was now.
The clock had to be attached to something, so flock wallpaper in nicotine yellow appeared and he was back in the medium’s front parlour, lately the favourite venue for his night terrors. Ceramic ladies and gallants, frozen in blushing dalliances, jostled for space on the mantelpiece with faded photographs of children, frowning, grinning and grimacing in sagging school jumpers and not understanding the need to strike a pose and pretend to be something or someone else. Every ten seconds, a parakeet let fly a piercing whistle and listened like a sonar operator for an answering echo from silent depths.
A gas fire hissed, brown frame bronzed in places and white elements blackened as if it were rarely turned off. The sofa was too comfortable, the room too warm, it was so difficult to speak or think or move. The diminished, bearded man in sellotaped glasses had in other dreams politely and slowly explained that Mrs Crowe was detained with another client. He smiled and hummed, not feeling the need to explain again, and had settled like dust into his armchair to read a paperback bible. He’d yet to turn the page from where it had fallen open in his lap.
The girl rocked slowly in the other armchair, eyes rolling, lips twitching and a thin tracery of drool sketching a lop-sided smile. Her fingers, pink and swollen with nails bitten to the quick, pawed with their own energy at her food-stained nightdress.
A mobile phone chose that moment to fill the room with a saccharine R&B medley that demanded to be silenced. Shuffling in the soft folds of the armchair while the tune swelled in volume and the singer’s desires grew more ardent, he plucked the wretched thing from a pocket to find it wriggling like an overturned cockroach. He flipped open its carapace and jabbed at a red button, silencing the pimp-crooner mid-groan. He’d missed calls from Slowey, from Hayley and most recently from himself.
The bearded man eyed him over his lenses, licked a finger and turned a page. The girl sobbed and bellowed unformed words. The bird cocked its head and eyed him. The murmur from beyond the frosted doors that led to Mrs Crowe’s conservatory had evaporated.
“Sorry. Probably work.” The clock resumed its ticking.
“What is it you do then?” The bearded man seemed to find his own voice surprising and his eyes returned to the pages before him as if for guidance.
“I think I’m a policeman.”
“What an odd thing to say. Are you or aren’t you?”
“I suppose that’s why I’m here.”
“I suppose so.”
“Next,” said the parakeet, unleashing another whistle that made him grit his teeth and squeeze shut his eyes. He held them shut, told himself to wake up, swearing that he’d see the real world when he opened them. Then the air changed; it was warmer, and the smell was all wrong, not leather and cannabis but stale sweat mingling with just used cat litter.
He prised open his eyes and was folded into a deckchair that was much too small for him, staring over his knees at Mrs Crowe while the fabric under his buttocks was slowly tearing stitch by popping stitch. The raised hook of a cat’s tail brushed his knees.
“Back again, Robert? The future isn’t a fruit machine, you know. You can’t make all those bad things go away just by pulling the lever again. Or are you one of those sceptics, come to catch me out?”
Mrs Crowe filled her half of the conservatory. Her pale blue eyes, receding behind thick spectacle lenses, were her sharpest feature. From the perm that domed her chubby face to the fleshy forearms that cradled pendulous breasts and ankles whose thickening flesh spilled from her slippers, she inhabited the space as fully as she could. She rarely moved, nor did she need to. The physical realm was of little interest to her. Only the glimmer behind her lenses, the faint movement of her blouse and the sheen of sweat on her lip confirmed she was alive and awake.
“I don’t mean to come here. It just happens.”
“Robert, you’ll wake up in a minute so we haven’t got time to debate fate versus free will. So, you just happen to come here the same way you just happened to turn up at that girl’s door when Hayley was working away. It says a lot that between us we can’t think of her surname. Always imagined you’d put in a better performance. A fumble on her f
uton, one and only one mediocre orgasm, a guilty sulk then a very pricy cab-ride home; barely seems worth undermining your marriage for.
“And don’t give me that look. The spirits told me all about it, not long after you knocked them back. Besides, I’m in your head and I see some rum stuff in here.”
The cat was patrolling between the potted plants, tail held aloft and twitching, a lonely dodgem looking for something to collide with. Harkness sighed and clung to his knees, knowing that if he relaxed into the deckchair he’d end up on the floor wearing it.
“So, Robert, you want to know, yet again, if you’ll ever be free of it. The big thing, the thing that makes a sneaky fumble look very small indeed?”
Harkness stared at the corrugated panes above his head, almost opaque with ivy and guano. He stared at the white band on his wrist where his watch should have been. He stared at his feet, finding plimsolls as grey as old chewing gum where his brogues should have been. He clamped his eyes shut and commanded himself to wake up, but she was still there, chuckling.
“No time. Not for this. Not today.” How could his voice quaver in his own imagination? What audience did he fear?
“Au contraire, mon petite gendarme. You can’t put it off any more.”
The heat had intensified and found a voice. Beads of sweat were squeezed from his face and he heard a sound like the mumbling and rustling of a restless audience awaiting the curtain’s rise. Mrs Crowe shrugged and turned her palms upwards, showing flames sprouting from her palms as new shoots of light split open the flesh of her wrists which recoiled in shreds of yellow, red and black.
“If you don’t end it today, it’ll just keep happening.” She tilted her head back and a scream leapt from her mouth, dragging with it a roiling column of smoke, filling Harkness’s lungs, crushing the light and reeking of tar and boiling meat.