Slice

by David Hodges

  She ran a hand down his thigh and grinned. ‘Oh you’ll make it up to me all right, Doyle,’ she promised, ‘you’ll make it up to me big time.’

  chapter 3

  ‘YOU’RE LATE!’ Detective Chief Superintendent Stoller commented from behind his newspaper as Fulton was ushered into his office on the middle floor of police headquarters.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ the big man retorted, a sour expression on his face as he dropped into a chair in front of the worn oak desk without offering any explanation.

  Stoller threw him a quick glance before returning to his newspaper. ‘I hope you washed your hands properly,’ he said.

  Fulton’s mouth registered a faint smile. He and Stoller went back a long way. In fact, they had gone through initial recruit training together twenty-seven years before and the balding ex-Royal Navy intelligence officer had spent even longer on CID than Fulton himself. Promoted to chief super from the National Crime Squad, Stoller had a shrewd analytical brain and was rated highly by the top team, having already been earmarked for assistant chief constable rank when a suitable vacancy was advertised.

  It was no secret that Fulton saw himself slipping into Stoller’s shoes the day his boss moved on, but jobs didn’t come with any guarantees in the police service and he knew there were those at chief officer level who would prefer to see him buried rather than promoted.

  ‘Not a very good photograph fortunately,’ Stoller said, folding the newspaper and tossing it across the desk. ‘But there’s as much info in the article as the detailed incident report your DI sent up here this morning.’

  Fulton’s face darkened when he opened the newspaper at arm’s length. The headline screamed at him: JUDGE’S LAST SITTING. Below was a fuzzy photograph of Lyall’s naked corpse slumped forward over the rope that tied him to the swing. ‘How the hell…?’ he began, his voice trailing off as he read on.

  ‘Easy enough with a telephoto lens,’ Stoller replied, ‘but I have to say it’s a rather unsavoury pic, even though it’s too dark to actually identify our man.’

  Fulton stopped reading for a second to throw him a baleful glance. ‘And what about this bloody headline?’ he blazed, stabbing the newspaper with a large finger. ‘It’s diabolical.’

  Stoller nodded. ‘Way out of line in my opinion, especially as there hasn’t yet been any formal identification or opening inquest by the coroner. As for the piece itself, while it doesn’t actually come up with a name, it doesn’t leave much to the imagination. Clear breach of the rules, I’d say. The chief constable is not at all amused and the force press officer is on her way to see the editor even as we speak.’

  ‘But how did they manage to get to the scene so soon after Lyall was found? Body went to the morgue just before I left and there was no sign of any press while I was there.’

  Stoller shrugged. ‘Probably a stringer living nearby – maybe did the job before you even arrived.’

  ‘Or one of our own after a quick buck.’

  Stoller winced. ‘That’s a bit harsh, even for you, Jack.’

  Fulton didn’t acknowledge the criticism, but finished speed-reading the article before tossing the newspaper back across the desk in disgust. ‘The whole lot’s in there,’ he said. ‘Every bloody detail.’ He made an angry gesture with one hand. ‘Now we’ve got sod all to keep back for interview if and when we pull anyone in. We’re totally stuffed.’

  ‘Maybe the post-mortem will turn up something?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but I wouldn’t want to hold my breath on that.’

  ‘When is it scheduled for?’

  ‘Probably tomorrow, once we’ve sorted out formal ID.’

  ‘And you’ll be there, I presume?’

  Fulton threw him an old-fashioned look. ‘No, I’ll be playing golf, what do you think?’

  Stoller gave a faint smile. He was well used to his old friend’s sarcasm and his almost legendary irreverence towards rank. ‘So what about the inquiry itself? Anything you need?’

  Fulton shook his head, still preoccupied with his thoughts. ‘Incident room should be up and running by the time I get back and arrangements have already been made for uniform to carry out a fingertip search of the rec and start local house-to-house enquiries this morning. As for publicity, it seems we’ve already got that in abundance.’

  ‘And the opening inquest?’

  ‘Coroner’s officer already has that in hand. Few days yet, I gather.’

  ‘And what about a press conference?’

  ‘You ask a lot of bloody questions.’

  Another smile. ‘Just trying to be helpful, Jack. HQ press office can field things for a while, but the media will be on your back with a vengeance from now on.’

  Fulton grimaced. ‘Don’t I know it! I’ll get the press office to put out a prepared statement. That will have to hold them until we’ve got something relevant to say.’

  ‘And you’ll keep me informed of any developments?’

  Fulton’s eyes narrowed. ‘As senior investigating officer,’ he said with emphasis, ‘I’ll tell you everything I think you need to know, OK?’

  Stoller nodded again, digesting the rebuke. ‘SIO or not, Jack, you’ve got a scorpion by the tail on this one,’ he said. ‘Lyall was very well connected. Personal friend of the Lord Lieutenant and the Lord Chief Justice. The inquiry will require sensitive handling.’

  ‘So?’

  Stoller hesitated, then fixed him with a hard stare. ‘In the strictest confidence, Jack, I have to tell you that our assistant chief constable operations has questioned whether you’re the right man for the job. He feels you lack the necessary tact and diplomacy.’

  ‘Bollocks!’

  ‘Which is exactly the sort of response he’s talking about.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘Depends on whether you’ve kicked the booze and can keep a lid on your domestic problems – which, to be brutal, is unlikely now that Janet seems to have done a bunk.’

  ‘My private life is my business.’

  There was a flicker of anger in Stoller’s grey eyes now.

  ‘Not when it interferes with your job performance it isn’t.’

  Fulton leaned forward in his chair, his expression a mixture of hurt and anger. ‘My performance, as you put it, has never been in doubt and my detection record is the best in the force, even though I do say so myself.’

  Stoller sat back in his chair. ‘You wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t,’ he said bluntly. ‘But it isn’t just about detections any more, Jack. Things have moved on and you’ve got to learn to move with them. Bulldozing your way through the rules and kicking arse to get a result is no longer acceptable.’

  ‘So who has ACC operations “I have a degree” Skellet got in mind as my replacement?’

  ‘No one is going to replace you, Jack. He’s just expressed the view that maybe this type of inquiry should be handled by someone a little less – er – direct.’

  Fulton wasn’t about to give up. ‘Like who, for instance?’

  Stoller fidgeted uncomfortably and fiddled with a paper-clip tray on his desk. ‘Phil Gilham’s name has been mentioned—’

  Fulton virtually erupted from his chair. ‘Phil Gilham!’

  ‘Well, he is a superintendent in waiting.’

  ‘Replaced by my own DCI?’ Fulton blazed, his hands clenching and unclenching in indignant fury. ‘Why doesn’t Skellet just chop my balls off and stick me on a swing like Lyall? At least then everyone gets a laugh at my expense!’

  ‘I’ve just told you, no one is going to replace you. I’m simply giving you a bit of friendly advice, that’s all. Don’t make any unnecessary waves, OK?’

  On his way to the door, Fulton half-turned. ‘And watch my back, eh?’

  Another fleeting smile from Stoller. ‘That goes with the territory, doesn’t it, Jack?’

  ‘Well, has he gone?’ Assistant Chief Constable Norman Skellet closed Stoller’s door behind him and stood there for a moment, the sharp penetra
ting eyes giving an unexpected vitality to the pale cadaverous features as they fastened on Stoller like those of a cobra.

  Stoller nodded and Skellet crossed to the window to settle his virtually non-existent rump on the edge of the windowsill. ‘Did you tell him of my misgivings?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘Predictably.’

  ‘Aha.’ Skellet opened a tin of throat lozenges and slipped one into his mouth. ‘And you still think he’s the man for the job?’

  ‘He’s the only one we have at present. All our other area detective superintendents are either on leave or tied up on existing enquiries.’

  ‘Hobson’s choice then?’

  Stoller winced. ‘I didn’t mean it like that – Look, sir, I know he doesn’t come across as such, but he’s one of the most experienced detective superintendents in the force, with a first-class track record.’

  ‘Just an image problem then, is it?’

  Stoller shook his head. ‘I didn’t say that. At times he can be a bit of a bull in a china shop, but he has a very sharp mind and the sort of tenacity that this case requires.’

  ‘But minus any semblance of the tact and diplomacy that is so essential here?’

  ‘He is a John Blunt, I agree, but solving Lyall’s murder is a tad more important than having the right social skills.’

  ‘Even if our sharp tenacious SIO looks like a slob, drinks too much and knocks his wife about?’

  ‘That’s a bit unkind, sir. I’ve known him for years and underneath that rough exterior he’s quite a sensitive, caring man. I certainly don’t see him as a wife beater and I know his other half has always been a bit of a problem. As for the drink’ – he shrugged – ‘he’s from an era when that was all part of the CID culture.’

  ‘Not any more, it isn’t.’

  ‘OK, so the world has moved on and he hasn’t, but that doesn’t mean he can’t do the job any more and he has a lot of street cred among his troops. They think the world of him. He may shout and swear at everyone in sight, but he’s fiercely protective of his own and he has stood up for members of his team on more than one occasion in the past.’

  Skellet frowned. ‘I’ve never understood that stupid clan thing. The job comes first, not the individuals in it.’

  Stoller sat back in his chair, twiddling a pen between his fingers. ‘Loyalty is important, sir,’ he murmured, ‘and it works both ways.’

  Skellet’s eyes narrowed as the reproof slammed home, but he chose not to respond to it and instead snapped to his feet and turned towards the door. ‘On your head be it then, Andrew,’ he threw back. ‘But remember, this is a very sensitive case and the chief needs a result like yesterday. You’d better make sure your star superintendent delivers the goods!’

  Fulton stopped by a burger bar to refuel on his way back to Saddler Street police station. The hollow pain in his stomach only subsided after he had demolished a double cheeseburger and chips.

  He was both angry and upset by Andy Stoller’s pep talk and although he would not have admitted it to anyone else, he felt strangely vulnerable now that he knew the knives were out for him. He had never fitted in with the new modernizing regime: the legion of bright young things who were flooding into the police service from university with their liberalist theories and obsession with rehabilitation, so-called restorative justice and political correctness. Like Stoller, he was an old-school copper, brought up with the rough ‘nick your own granny’ hard-liners who had once formed the backbone of the police service but, unlike Stoller, he had been unable to adapt to the rapidly changing environment around him and that had immediately typecast him in the eyes of his peers as a dinosaur.

  Maybe they were right too, he thought bitterly, feeding off his own sour mood and corrosive negativity, maybe he was a dinosaur – the sort of washed-up has-been who should have been got rid of years ago. Could be he was past his sell-by date in other aspects of his life too. That would explain why Janet had run out on him; no doubt seeing the man she had married as an overweight, sexually inept slob, joined at the hip to the job and the whisky bottle in equal measures and destined for the scrapheap. In fact, looking at his life, he didn’t seem to have made much of it overall, apart from putting villains behind bars.

  He had certainly been a great disappointment to his late parents and his older brother, Charlie. After a strict Christian upbringing, demanding total commitment to the local church and membership of both the choir and what he had privately referred to as its ‘coven of bell-ringers’, it had naturally been assumed by his father – the rural dean – that he would one day enter the ministry too, just like his old man and good old Charlie. Instead, he had thrown in his lot with the police force and as a result, after a monumental row in the vicarage, had suffered the pain of being ‘excommunicated’ by the family and shunned by his friends.

  He had tried desperately in those early years to come to terms with the hurt that had followed his rejection, but stubborn pride had prevented him from making the first moves to try to repair the damage and then, two years later, he was denied the opportunity when both his parents were killed in a boating accident while on holiday in Crete. As for Charlie, he graduated to archdeacon status and in the proper Christian tradition of forgiveness and reconciliation, wrote his errant brother off for good.

  He had never forgiven himself for failing to make his peace with his mother and father while he had had the chance and in an attempt to bury his feelings of guilt, had thrown himself into his career completely, excluding everything else and working horrendous hours that, perhaps inevitably, had culminated in an internal haemorrhage. He had met Janet then – a staff nurse, working in the local hospital’s casualty unit – and embarked on a torrid love affair with her. But he sorely underestimated the pretty girl from Basingstoke, and when she said she was pregnant he believed her and did the so-called decent thing of his generation. By the time he found out that she had deceived him, it was too late to do anything, but the ironic thing was that when, just two years ago, she finally decided to give up her nursing career to start a family and genuinely became pregnant she lost the baby.

  Ever since then his domestic life had become a living hell, with Janet blaming him and his preoccupation with his job for the tragedy, and turning to alcohol and other men for release. And now, despite all that he had on his plate, it looked like the very force he had sacrificed everything for was seeking to reward his dedication by plunging a knife in his back – with the one man he had always thought he could trust quietly taking on the role of Brutus. What a bloody awful mess!

  The bitterness and frustration welled up inside him as he sat at the little table and unconsciously he tightened his grip on the plastic cup he was holding, crushing it in seconds and spilling hot coffee over his hand and most of the table. As he tried to clean up the mess with a wad of paper napkins, cursing under his breath at the smarting pain in his hand, his mobile rang.

  ‘Hello, Jack.’

  He wiped his stinging hand with the last dry napkin as he held the mobile between his ear and one hunched shoulder. ‘What do you want now, Janet?’

  A throaty chuckle. ‘Murder inquiry going well, is it? It’s in all the newspapers.’

  He dropped the napkin in the middle of the coffee lake with the rest and eased back in his chair as an elderly woman in uniform bent over the table to wipe up the spillage with a dishcloth, shaking her head and muttering her disapproval.

  ‘Why are you doing this, Janet?’

  ‘Doing what, Jack? Don’t you want to talk to me?’

  ‘Of course I do, so where can we meet? We need to sort out this silly business.’

  ‘All in good time, Jack, all in good time. The game’s just beginning.’

  The telephone went dead again.

  ‘You are a messy pup!’ the elderly woman snapped as she bustled away.

  He ignored her, instead quickly interrogating his telephone. Janet’s call came up as ‘Unknown applicat
ion’.

  ‘Bugger it!’ he snarled, slamming the phone on the table and attracting curious glances from the other diners.

  ‘Bad news, Mr Fulton?’

  He looked up quickly and scowled at the thin bearded man in the faded blue anorak who was standing there. ‘What do you want, McGuigan?’ he said. ‘Come to gloat, have you?’

  The other laughed and pulled out a chair. ‘That’s not very nice, Mr Fulton. Mind if I join you?’

  ‘Yes, I do, so sod off!’

  McGuigan sat down anyway. ‘How’s the old murder inquiry going?’

  ‘Why don’t you read the bloody newspapers? They must all have the story by now.’

  ‘No point really, since I wrote it.’

  Fulton glared at him. ‘Didn’t you just, and a heap of the smelly stuff is soon going to drop on you from a great height.’

  McGuigan’s grin faded. ‘I simply report the news as it happens, Mr Fulton.’

  ‘Yeah, and foul up a police murder inquiry in the process.’

  ‘The public have a right to be told about violent crime.’

  Fulton leaned forward, studying him with absolute contempt. ‘Listen, McGuigan, I’ve known you too long to expect anything decent from you, but what kind of scumbag actually photographs a victim at a murder scene, then sells the pic to a national newspaper? You have to be sick.’

  The journalist flinched. ‘Selling stories is what I do as a freelance news agency, Mr Fulton,’ he snapped. ‘But it so happens that I didn’t take the picture this time. It was sent to me.’

  ‘Sent to you? How could that be? Damned body was only found a few hours ago.’

  McGuigan shrugged. ‘I don’t know about that, but the photo was pushed through my letterbox last night in a sealed envelope, accompanied by a sheet of A4, giving full details of the incident and its location. Then someone rang my doorbell repeatedly to make sure I got out of bed and found it.’