by Gavin Smith
The fields for home address, qualifications and employment had all been left blank, but he’d given the correct home town and first half of his postcode. He’d also taken the time to list his favourite films and books, a clashing mixture of the blood-thirsty and the mawkish. ‘Reservoir Dogs’ jostled with ‘Bridges of Madison County’, ‘Bravo Two Zero’ with ‘The Lovely Bones’.
Murphy must have either spent a lot of time on the site, or else visited frequently. As a farmer and trader of virtual livestock and crops, he had excelled. As an exponent of penguin-flipping for electronic fish, he was rarely bested. His exchanges with various other users, most of whom used aliases like his own, seemed largely banal, even when politically inspired. Complaints about traffic, the price of cigarettes and the need for goal-line technology were occasionally punctuated by Murphy’s endorsement of online petitions to make pilfering politicians rot in jail, to have life sentences mean life, or to have drug dealers flogged in the neighbourhoods they’d despoiled.
Here and there, Murphy had found kindred spirits, safely anonymous souls always ready to flatter, to sympathise, to log on and type in approving words with dozens of exclamation marks or an appreciative ‘LOL’. Until six month ago, he’d been content with inane banter and the odd grumble about long hours, low pay and domestic bickering. Since then, his life as seen through the lens of Facebook had been in freefall and the responses of his contacts less effusive.
Confiding his suspicion that his wife was sleeping around behind his back, a suspicion proved by gut feeling and the way she looked at other men, had elicited responses ranging from ‘just talk to her’ to ‘their al the saim wot you gonna do lol!!!!!!’. Concerned that even the kids now seemed distant towards him, he was told, ‘just talk to them, ‘it’s a phase’, or ‘yea they r all ungreatful jus let em no who brings hom th bacon lol!!!!!!’
Revelations about an impending disciplinary at work and a related law suit attracted a barrage of advertising from personal injury lawyers far and wide, an entreaty to ‘get sum gud advice’, an agreement that ‘there al blud sookers lol!!!!’ and a variety of winking or glum ‘emoticons’.
From then on, he’d been flying solo, his almost daily crises growing more and more shrill, less a cause for companionable small-talk and more a beacon of despair to ward others away. He’d been ‘naughty’ and ‘work didn’t know the half of it’. He’d broken his ‘own sacred code’ in the name of ‘private enterprise’, hooking up with ‘some very bad men’ just to make a bit of extra money for his family. He was probably going to get sacked for ‘the stuff they know about’. If they worked it all out, he’d be ‘at work for years, on the wrong side of them doors, with no weekends off.’
‘Cornered like a badger,’ he’d written two days before his death. ‘Call themselves friends and family but they are all just like lawyers, only wanting to rip my throat out and eat me alive. Don’t see a way out. Dug down too far already. Can’t see me getting through the week. Might still be an answer though. Desperate measures for the desperate man. If you’re reading this two weeks from now, I bet you’ve heard of me.’
Harkness found his eyes drawn once more to the sandy-haired child sucking his thumb alongside every comment, the image now a caricature of Murphy’s fractured mind. He smoothed down the document’s pages and placed it gently on the table as if its lethal anger could be so easily assuaged.
“That’s Murphy alright. Good job. Does management know about this?”
“’Fraid so. But I wouldn’t let it trouble you.”
“Because it reinforces the simple suicide version of Murphy’s death?”
“Exactly so. Still think it was suicide?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Harkness drained his coffee, dregs and all. “Either way, it wasn’t simple.”
“So, where to next?”
“Just let me get this straight,” said Harkness, snatching off his sunglasses and flicking out a finger for every point he made. “We’ve still got nothing but circumstantial evidence that Firth started the fire at Marne Close. Murphy seems to have caused his own death and there’s nothing to contradict that.
“The next door neighbours saw something important but are lying about it for reasons unknown. There was a fracas in the pub involving Murphy and Firth, before the fire and before Murphy’s fall, and we know both Braxtons were present or maybe even involved. We know Braxton junior knew and hated Firth enough to attack him in the presence of two uniforms the day after the fire. He later told Tommo it was a ‘business’ matter. What else?”
“Plenty,” began Slowey, looking up from his notebook. “We know from the custody record that Braxton junior had been to hospital that day complaining of various soft tissue injuries consistent with a bloody good hiding. I may have played my part in that given that his DNA links him to the burglary at the Friars’ Vaults and the lumps knocked into my head. One other person was involved in that break and we know it wasn’t Murphy and probably wasn’t Firth. Over to you. This is fun. Just like the telly.”
“This ‘Facebook’ intel and the accounts of Firth’s cell-mate and your tame prison officer suggest that Murphy was thoroughly dirty and ran a cottage industry supplying drugs inside prison. He also seems to have enjoyed enforcing his own kind of discipline, sometimes but not always to protect his business.”
“And Braxton junior is not only neck-deep in this mire, but he’s been abusing a 14-year old girl as well, giving us a pretty good choice of pretexts for whatever we want to do to him. Take it from me; this is not the job to be in for someone with three daughters. If Kelly were my blood, you’d never find Braxton’s remains. In fact you’d probably help me dispose of them.”
“Hasn’t he also given us somewhere else to find him and any physical evidence he might have kept? Didn’t the under-age girl and Firth’s cell-mate both mention an allotment?”
“Well spotted. Something else occurs. Braxton senior may have been the first to discover the fire at Marne Close. He was certainly in a God-almighty hurry to talk up his heroic efforts and get his version down in my notebook. Not much recent form, so he’s either gone straight or….”
“Got good enough at something naughty to avoid our attention…”
“Something that might have involved a four way conversation including his horrible son, Firth and Murphy in a pub that night, a night which ends badly for at least three of them.”
“Something for which an allotment might be handy?”
“And I bet it doesn’t involved prize-winning marrows.”
“Christ knows.” Harkness snatched off his sunglasses and rubbed hard at his eyes. “What a bloody mess. We’ve got plenty of shovelling left to do, you and me. I reckon I might miss Hayley’s deadline.”
“I’d offer you the box room if two of the kids weren’t sharing it already.”
“What, the one with the barred windows? Don’t worry. I’m working on an option.”
“Is that the modern term for it?”
“Don’t be cheeky. I should come back to work. This is getting too big for you and me to handle under the radar. We can’t run this one like George Smiley. There’s too much to do.”
“You’re right. But which do you think would be trickier: Unravelling this case or persuading the DI and the DCI that there is a case and you should be running it?”
“No choice, Ken. We need to do this properly. We’ll have to nick Kevin Braxton and maybe his dad too. We’ll have to search their house and this allotment if we ever find it. Sooner or later, somebody will notice all that forensic work on the balance sheets, not to mention that interview with Jeremy you’re jacking up. Christ knows what else will crop up when we start digging.”
“How are you going to sell it then?”
“I make it just gone three o’clock. The DCI’s a creature of habit, isn’t he?”
“Well he can always be found in the first floor lavvy at 0920 hours with a copy of the Daily Mail. And on the fairway by 1430 hours on a Friday. You didn’t answer
the question.”
“I’ll serve it up to him as a fait accompli.”
“I wouldn’t. He can’t stand foreign food.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Harkness eased the RS gently onto the broken and pitted tarmac of the lay-by off Heighington Road. He was relieved to find the space empty of its usual fly-tipped mounds of carpet off-cuts, broken fridges and rusting wheel-rims, or cars left by those whose furtive habits had inspired this shortcut.
This fast and open country road ran along elevated ground overlooking the city from the south-east. On his travels, Harkness had noted the surprising number of cars parked unattended in this lonely spot, at the start or near the end of the working day. Typically too expensive or well maintained to have been abandoned, this spoke of secret wisdom.
The simple answer came to him while driving past the local golf club on Washingborough Road, which ran north of Heighington Road and parallel with it on lower ground alongside the River Witham. The two roads bounded the wide and sloping fairways of the club, with the pot-holed lay-by and a collapsed barbed wire fence providing by far the cheapest membership option.
To the west, the road plunged into the shade of a desirable commuter village with its thick sandstone walls and ancient stands of horse chestnut and sycamore. To the east, the road swooped and dipped across wide fields of rapeseed, no longer soughing with the soft hopes of spring but parched into crackling thirst. To the south, the land peaked then fell away to the fens and the cracked concrete of quiescent bomber fields.
Harkness waited for the engine note of a passing car to fade into the dirt before he crossed the road. Through the tangled hawthorn, the concealed fairway dropped away over a blind rise; beyond it, the city sweated in its heat haze, its red-brick and sandstone lining the river and climbing the steep hill at the heart of the city, the defensible ground that had inspired the Romans to dig in and build their legionary fortress here. The colossal Norman edifice of the Minster surmounted the hill, a symbol of the righteous might of that empire, piercing the heavens and commanding the horizon across field, forest and fen for miles in any direction.
A few minutes of patient pacing led Harkness to the gap where the hawthorn had been cut back and a number of fence posts kicked or levered flat, the barbed wire stamped into the dry earth by golf shoes and trolley wheels. He sauntered through, trespassing without compunction, knowing that his visit to the club would be neither enjoyable nor relaxing. Perhaps he’d missed the point of golf, he reflected, as he spotted a figure clad in green visor, lemon-striped polo shirt and black and white check trousers hacking and spluttering at something in a hilltop bunker that might have been the ball but could just as easily have been a more gifted opponent.
Cresting the rise, he checked his watch and wondered how far into the game Brennan would have got by four o’clock if he’d started half an hour ago. He didn’t know the man’s handicap but he’d been playing here for most of Harkness’s service so must have been sufficiently close to par to set a reasonable pace. Scattered across a wide, undulating hillside of bunkers, groves, ponds and fairways, the striped poles and limp flags of the greens formed no obvious pattern. Finally accepting that he understood neither the layout of the course nor the rules of the game well enough to do otherwise, he walked briskly downhill, aiming to begin at the clubhouse and follow the herd.
Grateful that he hadn’t come across grounds staff who might have questioned his dress code or lack of anything to hit a ball with, he finally sighted Brennan’s party teeing off for the fifth hole. Brennan had loosened his tie and donned a single leather glove on his right hand, his only concessions to sporting attire. Harkness approached quietly, out of Brennan’s eye line, frowning and raising a finger to his lips as Brennan’s partner, a middle-aged bureaucrat Harkness vaguely recognised from HQ, glanced at him. Brennan’s eyes never left the ball as he checked his grip for balance, planted his hips, drew the club into a steady backswing then drove it through the ball in a graceful downswing, following through with a raised right heel. The ball drew a neat parabola between Brennan and the green, skewing right in mid-flight to roll off the grass and into sand.
“Good legs though,” said Harkness.
“I was trying to be a smartarse,” said Brennan evenly, hand still a visor as he stared at the bunker. “Compensating for wind which was there thirty seconds ago but dropped when I swung.”
“It’s easy to get caught out when the wind changes mid-swing.”
“Who the…” Brennan turned, spinning the club to grip it midway along its length. “What the bloody hell are you doing here, Rob? You’re not even a member.”
“Got a minute, boss?”
“You crack on, Paul,” said Brennan to the other golfer. “I’ll catch up.”
“Nice day for it.” Harkness watched Brennan stow his driver while the other man trundled away.
“You’d think so but I’m struggling for form today. Too much tension in the shoulders. Keep hooking my swing. It’s as if I instinctively knew some enormous pain in the arse was heading my way. So. Why are you trespassing on my quality time away from nagging, whining bastards?”
“We need to talk.”
“So talk.” Brennan peered into his club bag then drew out a sand wedge, testing its heft. “You’ve got as long as it takes Paul to get to the green and pot his ball. He’s crap, which is why I play with him, but you still haven’t got long.”
“I want to come back to work,” said Harkness.
“Catch,” said Brennan, throwing the wedge to Harkness. Without thinking, he raised his palms to meet it, curled in his fingers as its chrome shaft met his skin, felt the sparking jolt of pain flare up his arms and dropped the club with a gasp of surprise and indignation. “What do you think, Rob? Fit, are you? No, you can’t come back. We done?”
“No. We aren’t. Sir. We’ve got this case all wrong. You need me to make it right. I need to make it right.”
“You cheeky bastard. You’re on my golf course. Two ranks below me. Off duty. And you’re not even a member. So either tell me something useful or piss off and be grateful I’m getting soft in my old age.”
Harkness had intended only to ask for a restricted role in the enquiry team, easing himself gently into work without further risk of injury or litigation; but finding Brennan in a pugnacious mood, he knew only the truth, or most of the truth would serve him.
“You can’t write it all off to Firth. Here’s why.” Harkness summarised the conversation he’d had with Slowey in nearly every detail. He took care to make Marjorie and Jeremy appear as potentially threatened witnesses and nothing more. He also avoided any mention of Slowey’s name, although it was plain that he could only have stayed up to date with the enquiry with Slowey’s help. As he spoke, Brennan picked up the wedge and gripped it increasingly tightly with both hands as if he wanted to snap it in two or wrap it around someone’s neck.
“Let’s get this straight,” said Brennan, wedge now dropped to his hip while he jabbed an index finger towards Harkness. “You’ve been running around the town bothering witnesses and pretending to be on duty when you’re not. You’ve been exploiting Slowey, the only hard-grafting DC on my enquiry. And you’re trying to knock holes in my nice, neat and very soon to be filed away case with your conspiracy bollocks.”
“Mea culpa.” Harkness shrugged, a gesture he hoped would infuriate the other man a little more and make him fall off the fence, one way or the other. “But you know you can’t ignore it. Braxton will get hauled in very soon by someone. He’ll be asked all sorts of questions. His house will be searched. His dad might get nicked too. Then there’s Jeremy Jennings and Jake Barnaby. Christ knows what’ll leak out when they start talking.
“So tell me. Sir. Do you want to get this case right before you put it to bed, or when the Chief forces you to dig it out months from now when the papers and the lawyers are all over it like prickly heat?”
“You’re a scheming bastard, Rob. Don’t you know that if you ope
n this up, we could all be exposed to some unwelcome attention?”
“Yes, but I’ve always got the Nuremberg Defence to fall back on.”
“I was just thinking. If I took a good warm-up swing with my best driver and happened to bash your brains out, could I get away with it?”
“You could if my missus was on the jury.” Harkness looked over his shoulder, alerted to the presence of two elderly golfers in matching leisure-wear by a polite but persistent cough.
“Look, boss. Sorry to hack you off and all that. Hold a grudge and choke off my career if you want. Just let me off the leash for long enough to bottom this out. The Braxton boy will need processing for knocking Slowey about anyway. Just sit back and let nature take its course.”
“My office. Six o’clock. I want your plan in writing. Bring your man Friday too.” Brennan gestured at the elderly golfers to play through. “Don’t be late because I won’t be staying long. It’s salsa night and Mrs Brennan won’t be kept waiting.”
“So you’re back at work, officially this time?” Sharon lay naked on top of him, her frame pale and slender against his swarthy bulk, murmuring into his chest, head resting on crossed arms, her flesh sealed to his by the sweat of a feverish reunion now cooling and evaporating into drowsiness.
“Yes,” he said, letting an idle hand trace the notches of her spine from the chain at her neck, its intricate gold contrasting irresistibly with the ample whiteness of her breasts, to the small of her back and the swell of her buttocks.
“Is that all the conversation I get tonight?” she said, nipping him gently with her teeth.
“No,” he said, pinching her behind when she bit him again, harder, drawing a vague twitch of new desire.
“Come on. Talk to me now. Molest me again later.”
“I found the DCI on a golf course and demanded he let me work the case again.”