Mercy Killing

by Lisa Cutts

  Faces stared at him from around the room. There were dozens of empty chairs at the enormous conference table. Only six were occupied. He was surprised to see DCI Barbara Venice taking up one of the chairs. He didn’t ask her why she should be here at this time of night, and tucked away at the far unlit end of the table. She gave him the smallest of nods and he returned the gesture, making a note to ask her why she was still at the incident room six hours after her shift had ended.

  Harry couldn’t really make out in the gloom if Barbara was wearing the same clothes he’d seen her in earlier that day. If he was forced to guess, he’d say she had been home once and returned to work. The fact that the lights were out at her end of the table meant that she hadn’t moved and tripped the sensors for some time. For reasons he couldn’t give, he didn’t get the feeling she was there merely to keep an eye on him, despite her outranking him.

  A rattle of cups behind him alerted him to the missing member of the team as he hastened into the room behind Harry.

  ‘I made you a brew, boss,’ said Detective Constable Tom Delayhoyde, aware he was holding up the briefing but not keen to begin without a cup of tea.

  ‘Nice one,’ said Harry as he took a seat at the top of the table in front of the now dormant remote conference screen. Another of the constabulary’s money-saving devices that was rarely used, its staff still driving across the county for a twenty-minute meeting.

  He waited a minute for everyone to grab a mug from the tray, accepted his own as it was pushed towards him and ran an eye over everyone assembled before him. He watched each of them take a brand-new investigator’s notebook from the pile, ready to record all of their notes for that day’s latest incident.

  ‘OK,’ he began as he leaned back in the chair, his eyes momentarily fixing on each one of them. ‘Thank you for getting here as fast as you did. We’re looking at a murder investigation as you probably already know.’

  Harry paused for a second and said, ‘The victim is a male by the name of Albert or Albie Woodville. He has previous convictions for sexual offences against children.’

  Even though some in the room already knew about the deceased’s murky past, Harry sensed a change in atmosphere. He was expecting it but recognized it wasn’t his imagination getting the better of him.

  Detective Constable Gabrielle Royston, who sat to Harry’s right, looked up from taking notes and pursed her lips. DC Sophia Ireland next to Gabrielle let out a barely audible sigh and put her pen down on the virgin page of her A4 notebook. From the corner of his eye, Harry saw one or two of the others shift from side to side in their seats.

  ‘We’re professionals,’ he said, but allowed the words to hang in the air. ‘Whatever our personal views and opinions, we investigate this just the same as we would any other suspicious death or murder. It’s especially important that you keep your wits about you on this job because early indications from the crime scene are that we’re looking for two people who broke in and murdered him.’

  Once more he scanned the room.

  ‘Fortunately for me and the people of East Rise, I know that our victim’s past, and the fact that more than one person took his life, won’t affect how you handle your jobs or yourselves.’ Harry took a silent deep breath, looked down and said, ‘This is a very emotive enquiry. It doesn’t need me to tell you that.’

  Now he scrutinized the expressions, trying to read them as each of them concentrated on his every word.

  ‘Anyone who has an issue with this enquiry can speak to me after this briefing in private. I need you all, not to mention other officers in the morning, but only if you’re prepared to put aside any prejudices and show the commitment you’ve demonstrated on so many previous occasions.’

  The detective inspector gauged how his team were feeling from his chosen few words and opted to leave it there. Overdoing it would serve no useful purpose.

  The end of a briefing usually signalled the start of the next step: everyone with their task to perform, targets set until the next time they came together to lay their piece of the puzzle next to their colleague’s, waiting for the moment when it all made sense. This was what drove Harry and made him as committed to his job as he was.

  Tonight’s briefing, however, was different.

  It signalled the beginning of something in complete contrast to anything that had come before.

  He felt forced to go against all he believed in and enlist the help of those he despised the most. He struggled to remember a day when he felt more disgusted with what he was about to do.

  Chapter 12

  ‘What do you make of all that?’ asked Sophia as she strode beside Gabrielle trying to keep up as they made their way along the department’s deserted corridor through to the main part of the incident room. Their movement tripped lights as they went, illuminating the cheap blue carpet tiles. The aged floorboards squeaked mercilessly.

  ‘How do you mean?’ said the DC who was slightly younger in both years and police experience than her colleague, but somewhat taller. She ran a hand over her immaculate shoulder-length blonde hair and looked down towards Sophia.

  When they reached the incident room, Gabrielle made for a desk with Sophia trailing behind her. They ended up at adjacent computer terminals and Sophia immediately leaned across Gabrielle’s desk and said, ‘As if we wouldn’t give this job our all, the same as any other.’

  She couldn’t fail to register that Gabrielle kept her ice-blue eyes straight ahead, focused entirely on the screen in front of her. For several seconds she thought that she wasn’t going to get a response.

  ‘He was a nonce though,’ said Gabrielle in a voice so low Sophia was now almost shoulder to shoulder with her so that she could catch her words.

  ‘But he went to prison for what he did,’ said Sophia, unable to keep her own voice as hushed.

  Sophia’s head snapped in Tom Delayhoyde’s direction as he looked up from his seat, metres away from the two women within the rectangular room, a frown on his face.

  Her view of Tom was obscured by the other three from the briefing as they moved about the room, gathered their strewn equipment and paperwork, and moved in and out of Sophia’s line of vision.

  The noise they made as they got ready to rush out to their allocated enquiries almost drowned out Gabrielle’s muttered verbals.

  ‘I wouldn’t be quite so sure he went to prison for absolutely everything he did. There’s clearly someone who thought they had unfinished business. Besides, you heard what the DI said in the briefing about the stuff in Woodville’s spare bedroom. Please try to tell me how anyone finds that acceptable. And not forgetting what kind of perverted child porn we’ll probably find on his phone and computer.’

  Even though Sophia had known Gabrielle for a couple of years, they were nothing more than colleagues, with little attempt on Gabrielle’s part at contact outside work. She had tried to be welcoming when Gabrielle had arrived on their team, but her hand of friendship had been very much slapped away.

  It was then with an unsettling feeling that Sophia looked from the computer screen to Gabrielle, before staring back again.

  A smile was twitching at the corner of the younger detective’s mouth as she gazed upon the sight in front of her.

  The terminal screen was filled with a colour crime-scene-investigator image of Albert Woodville’s purple, mottled face, mouth open, eyes dead.

  During her twelve years of policing, Sophia had seen a lot of unpleasantness, sometimes exhibited by those she worked closely with. A black sense of humour kept them all going from time to time, took away the pressure and relieved some of the stress, but she failed to find anything funny about the sight of the man’s swollen, dead face.

  Unsure which she found more fascinating, the grotesque picture on the computer screen or the look on Gabrielle’s face, Sophia watched with a growing feeling of discomfort as Gabrielle enlarged the image and pitched forward in her seat to get a closer look.

  Sophia was so busy staring that DI Harr
y Powell had to call her a third time from his office door before she realized that her name was now being shouted.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said and turned one hundred and eighty degrees in her chair. ‘I was completely engrossed in something.’

  She hurried over to where he stood and followed him into his office. Without being told to, she shut the door behind her. Whether he wanted to speak to her in private or not, she had something she wanted to say to him and didn’t want to be overheard.

  Harry leaned against the windowsill, hands in his trouser pockets, waiting for Sophia to speak.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked, curious as to her hesitation and why she had closed the door.

  Her lip-biting silent response answered his question.

  He waited again while she tucked her wavy mousey hair behind her ears, round expressionless face giving nothing away.

  ‘I’m a bit worried about Gabrielle,’ she said, taking care with her words. ‘I’m not sure how she’s taking to this one. Her initial reaction seems a bit odd but perhaps it’s because it’s been one of those weeks.’

  Her detective inspector nodded at her. ‘I know there’s been a lot of overtime all week, plus the fortnight or so beforehand was busy for the whole department. We’re all knackered.’

  He could sense that there was something else that Sophia wasn’t telling him. He had worked with her on and off for a while now and she had a good reputation for being hard-working and trustworthy. The same could be said of Tom Delayhoyde but Gabrielle Royston was a different matter.

  ‘What’s up with Gabrielle?’

  ‘I’m not really sure. It’s not as if it’s her first murder and she’s been here for some time. I get the feeling that she’s …’

  Sophia really didn’t want to say it. Although she had a lot of respect for Harry, and felt that as the DI he should know what was going on in his incident room, she didn’t want him to think she was a grass.

  She decided to keep her suspicions to herself for now. Perhaps she had overreacted. It was her sixth consecutive day on duty, she had worked over sixty hours since the start of her shift pattern and there were hours of the night still to go; that was without the thought of getting out of bed early for the next two days until her final tour of duty. She would see things differently after a day off and reflect on her bad decision to shovel more worry onto the senior investigating officer of a murder enquiry.

  ‘Nothing, no nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ll get her to come and see you if she says she’s got a problem.’

  She turned to go out of the room and then remembered that it was he who had called her into the office in the first place.

  ‘Sorry, sir. What was it you wanted?’

  ‘I wanted to make sure that you were OK before I leave the nick to see someone. You had me worried in the briefing. It’s acceptable if you’re not on board with this one.’

  ‘Worried?’ she said, starting to feel that the DI was losing his touch: it was another member of his team he should be concerned about, not her. ‘I admit to finding what Albert Woodville had in his spare bedroom a bit unsettling, but I’m OK.’

  ‘Apologies, Soph. I know that child protection wasn’t something you were ever involved in before you came to Major Crime, so I wanted to make sure you were OK. I don’t want to be criticized for being one of those DIs who doesn’t go in for all that touchy-feely bollocks and forgets about his staff. Although I do mean it when I say don’t stay too late tonight – there’ll be loads to do over the weekend.’

  She nodded and left, annoyed that he had got the whole thing so wrong, and almost changed her mind about telling him her fears over Gabrielle’s attitude.

  One thing she did know as she made her way back across the incident room, was that Detective Inspector Harry Powell wasn’t as good as he thought he was at getting the measure of people.

  Chapter 13

  Millie was on the verge of hanging up on her brother, but she knew how he had reacted to bad news in the past; even the death a few years ago of his beloved boxer dog, Digby, had sent him off into depression. Ian had packed a bag and disappeared. He hadn’t contacted anyone for months and then only turned up again because he had been living in Crete, working in a bar, and the holiday season had come to an end. With nowhere else to go, he had come back to England.

  Getting a taxi to his house this time of night was out of the question for Millie: she wasn’t about to wake the children and take them with her and she didn’t have anyone to watch them.

  Another new feeling of hopelessness came over her, this time mixed with anger at her brother who had given her something else to fret about.

  ‘Please,’ she said into the receiver, ‘don’t tell me that you’ve done something stupid.’

  Tears formed in the corner of her eyes. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t cry, not again. Her life was slowly unravelling and everything she’d done over the past six years to get it back on track was feeling like a waste of time. She’d worked so hard to lighten the blanket of grief she’d carried on her shoulders since the death of her husband.

  It had started small, with a trip somewhere familiar on her own, then a trip somewhere new, a visit to a place she and Clive had thought about going to. After what felt like forever but which was in reality only twelve months, each little task hadn’t seemed so daunting. The heavy blanket weighing her down became lighter and lighter until she was only aware of its presence on particularly low days.

  Now her brother was scaring her into thinking something even worse was about to happen to her family.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, eyes closed, waiting for her brother to say something, hoping that he hadn’t passed out.

  ‘Hello, Millie,’ said a different but familiar voice. She opened her eyes, couldn’t place who it was. ‘It’s Dave.’

  ‘Oh Dave,’ she said. ‘Stupid of me. Of course it’s you. I’m glad you’re with him. I can’t make head nor tail of what he’s on about. What’s happened?’

  ‘Your brother’s very upset about all you’ve been going through, Mills, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, he told you?’ She missed the absence of a cord on the end of the phone to twirl around her fingers. Something to occupy her spare hand would have distracted her from the embarrassment of someone else now knowing her business. Worst of all was that that someone was David Lyle, her brother’s best friend, a man she had spent years nurturing a crush on until she met Clive.

  ‘Is there anyone who doesn’t know about the fool I’ve made of myself and more importantly the danger I’ve put my children in?’

  She heard him let out a slow breath.

  ‘Do you want me to get a taxi over?’ he asked. ‘We’ve both been drinking so I can’t drive. I can be there in about twenty minutes.’

  She thought of Dave, tall, muscular, reliable, handsome. There was little doubt that the worst thing she could do right now was to ask a man to her house so late on a Friday night. She didn’t like the idea of being alone again after the companionship she’d shared with Albie, but look how badly that had gone. If nothing else, Millie recognized the peril of feeling more vulnerable and desperate than she ever had. She couldn’t afford to make another mistake.

  Albie was the first man to show any interest in her after her husband’s death, and in truth, the first man she had looked at twice. Even now, she wasn’t entirely sure why she had given Albie so much as a second look. Clive had been everything that Albie wasn’t.

  Perhaps that was the reason, or maybe it was because he’d seemed so unlikely to be a threat to her or to leave her for someone else. She couldn’t bear the thought of more heartache. He might even have been grateful that a younger woman was paying him attention, especially one who already had a family and responsibilities. She saw so clearly now that this was why he’d picked her out of the crowd – she had children.

  ‘I think you should stay and look after Ian,’ Millie answered. ‘He sounds as though he’s in no fit state to be l
eft alone.’

  She bit her lip, desperate for company, but the need to keep her children safer than she had so far managed outweighed her own desire for someone to talk to.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure?’ he said, oblivious to the fact that she was shaking her head at the answer she was about to give.

  ‘Positive. Stay with Ian, but, Dave—’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘He hasn’t gone and done anything stupid, has he?’

  ‘Don’t worry about him. Where he goes, I go. The two of us will look after you, Sian and Max. Get some sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning.’

  She listened to the sound of the disconnected tone and gazed at the phone’s display in the gloom.

  In some ways, it would have been better if Dave hadn’t been with her brother. Ian often did impetuous and thoughtless things but they were usually on a small scale. The only reason he had taken off to Crete was because Dave had booked him the flight and driven him to the airport. It had always been the same throughout their childhood: every ridiculous and reckless thing the two of them had ever undertaken had Dave behind it.

  The worst worry of all was that, on the day Millie married Clive, Dave had told her that he would always look out for her and be there if she needed him. At the time, it had given her a tiny thrill to know that someone who had meant so much to her was on her side. He had repeated his promise to her on the day that Clive had died, too.

  His words were so vivid that even now she could remember them.

  ‘If anyone ever harms you, I’ll come for them.’

  Chapter 14

  Even as Harry Powell slowed his car and turned off the headlights, he wondered if he was doing the right thing. It was one thing to go out on enquiries – usually met by whispers of, ‘Doesn’t he know he’s the DI and supposed to stay indoors?’ – but it was another to take himself off in the middle of the night and meet up with people who didn’t always stay on the right side of the law.