Bright Spark

by Gavin Smith

  “No you didn’t. You did, didn’t you?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “So what’s the gossip?”

  “I can’t tell you. You’re the enemy.”

  “But you’re sleeping with the enemy. That makes you a collaborator. So collaborate.”

  “Again? Ow. Stop biting or I’ll have to restrain you.”

  “Come on. Talk to me.”

  “Two other suspects have emerged and will shortly be helping us with our enquiries. Ouch. Jesus.” He slapped her behind briskly and she withdrew her teeth. “Alright, I’ll talk. There were two other men in the pub where Murphy confronted Firth on the night of the fire. Forensics links one to the break in there and the assault on Slowey. A little bird also tells me Murphy was bent, into drugs, supplying rather than using. That is absolutely it. You ok?”

  “Course I am.” She placed her cheek against his chest, eyelashes flickering like butterfly wings against his skin while her hand reached up to cradle his face and hush his mouth. “I shouldn’t be asking. I’m sorry. It’s inappropriate.”

  “I trust you,” he said, kissing her thumb.

  “You don’t even know me. You shouldn’t.”

  “I spoke to Slowey, by the way.” So far, so true. He had only to maintain this breezy tone to sustain the half-lie. “He was gutted that your mum was so upset. It really was just bureaucracy. There is one thing though…”

  “What?” She drew back her hand and propped herself on her elbows to fully engage with him, her breasts now starkly white against his chest, while he steeled himself to manipulate this young woman and her family a little more.

  “Slowey thought she was nervous about something, too nervous, on Jeremy’s behalf or her own. We have to be open to the possibility that one of them saw something significant and she was threatened.”

  “Jesus,” she slid off him and gathered a sheet around herself, folding away the intimacy.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “It’s fine. I asked. You’re being nice, I suppose.” She squeezed his hand briefly, for form’s sake. “It’s just odd. You put your armour on again for a moment there. Became your job.”

  “I should go.”

  “No. Don’t. Shall I ask mum what’s going on?”

  “Please don’t worry. It’s just Slowey being cautious. It might amount to nothing. There’s absolutely no suggestion they’re in danger.”

  “You mean the way the Murphys weren’t in danger before they were all wiped out one night?”

  “We’ll know a lot more by this time tomorrow.”

  He almost balked at her anxiety, knowing this as the first sign of feelings for her he didn’t want to feel. Still, keeping her off balance could be useful.

  “But if you happen to see them, well, you’re family; you’ll read them better than we ever could. Your mum may open up. Look, I should just stop. I’ve crossed a line.”

  That much was true, he reflected; he was satisfying his need for evidence and his need for love with this one young woman and tainting all of it in the process.

  “We both have.” She turned onto her side to face him and he mirrored her, clasping her delicate hands in one of his own. “Does she know?”

  “Not everything. But she knows enough.”

  “What will she do?”

  “You needn’t worry. There’ll be no doorstep argy-bargy.”

  “What about you?”

  “I just don’t know. I guess I’ll be on my own again, one way or another.”

  The silence opened and beckoned a response and she gave none. Perhaps she didn’t want to be the home-wrecker or the quick-fix girlfriend, offering him a roof over his head and blundering into cohabitation out of a misplaced sense of responsibility. Nor perhaps did she want to expressly refuse him, as he answered a need she wasn’t quite ready to relinquish.

  “I can go. It’s no problem.”

  “It’s too late for that. No point bolting the barn door when the horse is being ridden hard towards the finish line.”

  “Speaking of ridden hard…”

  “Stop it.” She punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Bad dog. Just stop talking about work. It doesn’t belong here. In fact, we should both just stop talking.”

  He squeezed her hand, kissed her fingers and joined her in a silent study of the stippled ceiling. For twenty minutes, they both sealed their eyes shut and marvelled at how completely their polarities had shifted. The need to physically possess, to immerse and be immersed, had switched in a heartbeat of tumult and clarity to a simple need to be clean, alone and apart. Harkness opened his eyes then waited for them to dilate and show him as much as the shadows ever would. Then he stealthily retrieved his clothes and crept out of the bedroom, respecting her pretence of sleep.

  The convoy straggled out of the Beaumont Fee car park far later than Harkness had planned. The pro-active search team had rolled up for the briefing an hour late, bacon baps and styrofoam coffees in hand, having finished late the previous night and insisting on their regulation eleven-hour break between shifts.

  Then the DI had insisted on being briefed separately, intent on asserting whatever authority he thought he’d lost when Harkness had approached Brennan directly. Finally and inevitably, a search had to be mounted for the car keys, the pool cars assigned to CID having been claimed as a precautionary measure by the first officers through the door at 0630 that morning.

  Not that Harkness was duly troubled by the fact that their two unmarked cars and one caged van didn’t arrive at 9 Marne Close until shortly after nine o’clock. They needed to arrest Kevin Braxton, who was highly unlikely to be out of bed that early. Keith Braxton’s rust-bitten old flat-bed Transit was absent from the driveway, leaving its profile in parched weeds, scuffed gravel and sump oil. He’d presumably left for work, and while he’d need to be interviewed sooner or later, the grounds were lacking and arresting him invariably led to a bloody scuffle and grumpy custody staff.

  Harkness stood on the pavement scanning the front windows for movement and flying projectiles while two of the pro-active team in body armour, football shirts and jeans approached the front door with a metal ram. Slowey tagged along with the other two team-members who approached the side gate to the rear garden wielding the dog-shield – essentially a full-size riot-shield with battery-powered electrical contacts on its front surface and a trigger on one of the hand grips. They’d yanked the item from the van’s crew compartment to deal with the bull terrier that eyed them hungrily through the garden fence, growling and straining at its chain.

  The front team waited for the dog to be pacified; there might have been other dogs, or that dog could have the free run of the house. Slowey tried the handle to the side gate, found it unlocked, waited for the team to fill the space with their shield then allowed them to push it open. The dog spouted noise and drool at the intrusion, lurching on its hind legs, chain wrapped taught across the bulked sinews of its chest.

  “Down, boy!” shouted a cop, pulling the trigger. The air crackled and snapped in an explosive convulsion, blue light arced; then the dog was peering at them over drooping shoulders from the furthest corner it could reach, abject and trailing moist excrement.

  A few more seconds passed then the front door team were given the all-clear. They wasted a second knocking and announcing themselves then the ram swung against the door handle until it deformed, splintered and yielded. The fact that the door lacked extra locks or reinforcement suggested that either Braxton kept nothing of interest here, or believed he was untouchable.

  The first team secured the ground floor, allowing the second team in through the back door to move upstairs. Within a minute, they’d established that the house was empty or the occupants were carefully hidden. Slowey took charge of the scene log, satisfying his need to keep order and keep his hands clean. Harkness picked up the dog shield, propped next to the back door, and explored the back garden while the dog darted furtive glances at him from its shameful corner,
trembling and whimpering. He suspected its spirit had been broken long before it had seen an electric shield.

  Twice the length of the house, the garden nonetheless seemed truncated, half of it given over to a hoary apple tree that had spread upwards, outwards and then downwards to mesh with a wild profusion of rowan and bramble. A few minutes of jabbing and probing with a broom handle and the shield yielded nothing and it seemed unlikely that anyone could have quickly penetrated it and then shinned over the towering leylandii borders planted by the neighbours on either side to hedge the Braxtons in.

  A fire-pit for barbecues had been dug and scorched into the scrap of lawn and ringed with half-bricks. Broken and faded toys, footballs in various stages of deflation and empty lager tins crushed by hand and under feet littered the piss-burned grass. Harkness picked a path through a minefield of dog turds and considered the garden shed, the garden’s one neat and new feature, its sides freshly planed and varnished, its black roof not yet blanched by the sun. The hasp hung loose, the door not secured by any means. Inside, an assortment of old bikes jostled for space with power tools so new they could have been stolen to order only yesterday. Harkness found no obvious hiding place for drugs nor any hint that the Braxtons had any use for garden tools.

  The search team had flung open every window to aerate the house, sweeten its odour of dog and stale beer and broadcast the clatter of their ungentle search across the length of the street. The drugs dog was en route and would perform a sweep of the premises, but Harkness wasn’t confident it would find much. Braxton was too old and jaded to keep his merchandise behind an inch of plywood on a street alive with twitching curtains.

  “Ta da!” announced Slowey from the kitchen door, brandishing a clear plastic evidence bag containing a slender black box punctured by various ports and sockets for cabling.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” said Slowey, gleefully. “Dumb bastard. Kevin, I mean. I assume it’s Kevin, sleeping in the box room with strippers and gangsters on the wall. Kept it under his bed. It’s still got blood on it. Probably mine.”

  Harkness snatched the bag from Slowey, compelled to touch it before he could believe in it. He held it before his eyes, studying the gold lettering on its casing and the long serial number etched under its USB ports. The numbers matched the ones he’d typed into the briefing document hours earlier. He was looking at the hard disc recorder stolen from the Friars’ Vaults on the night of the fire.

  “The fact that he’s got it is manna for us. Can’t wait to see what’s on it.”

  “Dad won’t be pleased that junior kept a trophy from a burglary they should have walked away from clean.”

  Voices spiked from the street, cutting across the background noise, in the gathering tempo of a confrontation. Slowey and Harkness nearly wedged themselves together in the side gate in their hurry to see who’d arrived.

  At the end of the driveway, a middle-aged woman clasped a mobile phone to her face while one outstretched hand remained firmly planted on the chest of a burly member of the pro-active team. Her hair dyed to the sheen of brass and her skin parboiled by the sun, she faced the policeman with chin jutting and flesh spilling from her slight and tight summer wear. By her side, a girl of around eight years-old idled, studiously bored and twisting and untwisting shopping bags around her skinny legs.

  “You don’t come in ‘til I know who you are,” said the policeman with the exasperated air of repetition. “And no phone calls either.”

  “You ain’t got no right to be in my house, we ain’t done nothin’. This is harassment, I know what this is. An’ I’ll phone who I like, I got my rights.”

  “Just. Tell. Me. Your. Name.”

  “No. Fuck. Off.”

  “Then you stay out there.”

  “I’m ringing my solicitor. I hope you brought your chequebook for when I sue your arses.” She thumbed a button on the phone as her eyes alighted on the evidence bag in Harkness’s hands with a squint of irritation.

  “Ring who you want, duck. Fill your boots.”

  “No!” shouted Slowey, moving forward.

  “Keith? Val. Yeah. I know you’re working. And cops are tossing the house.” She span away from the burly cop as he lunged for the phone, hunching her shoulders over it. “Found that fuckin’ computer that Kev kept under his bed. Don’t you fuckin’ swear at me. I didn’t know. Ain’t my fault. Sort him out yourself. Just you get….”

  The burly policeman wrapped his arms around the woman in a bear-hug and dropped her backside-first onto the pavement as he jerked the phone from her grasp, blood welling from scrapes on his hands left by lacquered fingernails. He studied the display and tried to lift it to his face but the woman rolled back onto her feet, spitting and clawing at his hands and face.

  Harkness wedged himself between them, straightened to his full height, bunched the meagre threads of her t-shirt in his fist and dragged her upwards to meet his face. “Stop!” he shouted, unsure whether she’d flinch and acquiesce or head-butt him. The eight-year old chose that moment to burst into gasping sobs. Torn between two instincts, the woman sank to the ground in a daze.

  “Cuff her,” said Harkness to the burly cop whose hand now dripped blood onto the pavement. “Attempting to pervert the course of justice. Oh, and police assault.”

  “What about this one?” said the cop, ratcheting his cuffs and gesturing to the child.

  “Who can look after your kiddie while you’re with us? Oh, and where are Kevin and Keith? Tell me and save me the bother of turning your house inside out.”

  Harkness squatted to glare at the woman, just out of slapping or clawing distance. She shrugged and raised her right middle finger as the left hand was pulled behind her back and cuffed, face trembling between tears and laughter, faint bruising around one eye blossoming like blotted ink as her blood cooled.

  “Damn. Slowey, where’s this allotment?”

  “They ain’t there,” shouted the woman.

  “Looks like ‘they’ are together then. Thank you, Mrs Braxton.” Harkness unlocked the pool car and flung the evidence bag into the boot. “Come on, Slowey. Let’s see how green your fingers are.”

  Kevin Braxton thrust the rusty spade hard into the soil, enjoying the gliding rasp of dirt so dry and full of gravel it could have been shale. He crossed his hands on its handle and propped a trainer on the back of its blade. He frowned briefly at the permanent tide-mark that had ruined his new Nikes, but knew he’d soon be able to replace them a thousand times over. He’d made a good investment with nothing more than the sweat that stained the lining of his baseball cap and the toil of hands once soft but now blistered and calloused by the hard grain of the spade.

  It had taken his dad more years than he could imagine and an appetite for violence to get into the dealing business and free himself from labouring for a living. Kevin wouldn’t be such a slow starter. He could work just as hard if he chose to, whatever the old man said about him being an idle gobshite and having it too easy.

  He’d proved he could graft with all his unpaid labour in the school holidays, mixing cement, swinging a pick, brewing up, being the butt of everybody’s piss-taking. And he’d done exactly what he was told when his dad got windy about him bringing Kelly to the allotment; labouring and sweating like his father’s son to secure the investment. But one day, soon, he’d grab the main chance, cracking any heads he needed to crack, branching out, using the old man then getting out from under him.

  The merchandise was now buried good and deep on an abandoned plot, well away from his dad’s plot on the allotment. He’d noticed the old bill and the ambulance people traipsing all over it a few weeks ago when the old bed-wetter who owned it was found dead in his shed by another dodderer.

  Heart attack, he’d heard later; probably blew a gasket playing with himself over a nice pair of tabloid tits. Kevin had been getting ready to do Kelly in the shed when he’d heard the commotion. She’d enjoyed the sport at first, keeping deathly quiet and pee
king through the netting of the shed’s window. Then she’d got giggly and he’d had to remind her he could do time with the nonces if the coppers got curious. She hadn’t liked it much when they did it in silence though; she’d got timid without the usual blather and bullshit to get her going and he’d had to finish quickly to stop her crying and making noise. Reliving it later, alone, he knew he liked it more that way, with her just shutting up and taking it fast and hard. He hadn’t been nicked either, not then and not ever, and he’d seen something useful to tell his dad about.

  That had come in handy last night. While the old man unearthed the plastic-wrapped blocks of heroin and bags of coke and pills from beneath the shed and made some calls, Kevin had dug a hole in the dead man’s vegetable plot. He’d had to choke down pride to grab the spade and stab it into the earth again and again, almost gagging on it whenever his dad told him he was digging like a queer, prodding at it like a mincer, not getting stuck in, not earning his inheritance. He plunged his energy into the splitting earth, hating it and cleaving it and relishing the fact that it was endless like his hate.

  Minutes into the digging, he’d become a dynamo, every stroke creating its own energy, the inertia of spite. He’d stopped when the light ebbed, looking up at his looming dad from a wide trench almost as deep as he was tall. Dad had laughed at him, called him a mentalist and wondered if he’d dig his own grave as well, but at least the ‘queer’ jokes dried up.

  He’d wrapped the gear in multiple plastic tarpaulins, covered it over with hundreds of pounds of earth and replaced the desiccated greenery on top as naturally as he could. He’d then helped his dad smooth over any trace of digging at their own plot, spread the spoil out widely and scattered and sprayed rat poison, cat deterrent and slug pellets all over both plots in the hope that they’d hurt or baffle a police dog if it ever came to that.

  They’d finished off this morning, starting at first light, before dog walkers or pottering gardeners appeared, and before the sun gathered its full strength. The day had gone well, so far. No pushing and shoving, no ‘queer’ or ‘nonce’ jibes. His dad had even laced his coffee with whisky. Now he rested on the spade, buzzing a little from the liquor and the little snort of amphet he’d palmed the night before to help him start the day with a whizz. King of all he stood upon, he guessed at the prodigious street value of the chemicals five feet beneath his feet, certain that he’d get his slice of the action if he barked and chased balls and rolled over when the old man told him to. He heard laughter, clean and child-like and tried to smile; finding his mouth otherwise engaged, he realised the laughter was his.