Bad to the Bone

by Tony J. Forder

  ‘Yes. Me, too.’ She smiled. Cleared her throat hurriedly and looked away. She finished with the plants and sat down in a chair opposite the two police officers.

  ‘I knew Bernie quite well,’ Dunne offered. He took a sip of his drink, eyes distant now. ‘He was a popular chap. Very good at his job. My name is Bobby Dunne, perhaps he mentioned me.’

  She shook her head, cheeks flushing a little. ‘There were so many names. I’m sure he did if you’d worked together.’

  ‘There were a few cases. The odd drink after work. This has all come as a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it has.’ She smiled and nodded expectantly. ‘So, tell me why you’ve come here today. I’m intrigued.’

  ‘I can well imagine. I share your sense of intrigue, Mrs Weller,’ Bliss told her.

  ‘Please, call me Allison.’

  ‘Thank you. Allison, did you know Bernard was on his way to see me yesterday?’

  ‘When he was…?’ Mrs Weller frowned, shook her head. ‘No, I had no idea. When the police asked me where he was going, I told them I didn’t have a clue. I couldn’t imagine why he was on the A16, though I did know the road went all the way down to Peterborough. Why was he coming to see you?’

  Bliss drank some of his tea before proceeding. Used the pause to process his thoughts. ‘That’s just it. I don’t know. He called me the night before last, left a message on my machine at home. I was surprised to hear from him, even more so when he said he wanted to meet. It sounded to me as if he didn’t want to give too much away before we caught up.’

  ‘How odd.’ Her frown deepened. ‘You know, he was acting strangely the other night. He’d been his usual self all day, and then later on that evening he seemed… I don’t know, preoccupied. Anxious, even.’

  ‘And you have no clue as to why?’ Bliss’s curiosity deepened. His instincts were right on this one, he could feel that all the more now.

  ‘No. It was a usual evening for us, as far as I can recall.’

  ‘Did anyone pop round? Were there any phone calls?’

  Allison Weller thought about that for a few moments. She wore a navy pleated knee-length dress over flat-heeled boots. Into the dress was tucked a linen blouse, buttoned fully to the neck. Her hair looked clean, but she’d applied no make-up. A neat, orderly woman, even in mourning.

  She shook her head. ‘No one came round, I’m certain about that. As for the phone, I’m almost as sure that there were no calls. Certainly not before his mood changed.’

  ‘Thinking about it now, can you pinpoint anything that might have upset your husband?’

  ‘Inspector, I’m not sure where this is all leading. What exactly are you suggesting?’

  Bliss edged forward on the chair, softening his eager gaze. ‘Allison, I’m just trying to make sense of why Bernard called me. I can’t help but wonder what it was he wanted to say.’

  ‘Do you think it’s important? Could it have been on his mind when he… when the accident occurred?’

  ‘It’s possible. But it seems strange to me that he would make the call out of the blue the way he did, seemingly without anything prompting the change in him.’

  Her eyes went blank for a while. Bliss could tell she was struggling to remember the last evening she and her husband had spent together. He said nothing, hoping she could fill in a serious void. Eventually she nodded.

  ‘We were watching the news after dinner. The national news switched to regional, and Bernie was annoyed that we’d got the wrong one again. Sometimes we get the London version, but this time it was the Anglia region. I was doing the crossword in my newspaper, leaving Bernie to chunter through the features as he usually does.’ She paused, smiling gently. ‘He always had an opinion on something. The only thing that strikes me as odd now is that he went quiet for a while. Next time I glanced up he was marching out of the room. Now that I think about it, his face was quite stern.’

  Bliss frowned. What on earth could Bernard Weller have seen on the news that would have upset him so much and driven him to make…

  His mind cut the thought off in mid-flow. Bliss felt a shiver work its way down his arms and across the back of his neck, tiny hairs rising in its wake. He knew exactly what item would have been on the regional news that night. Tuesday night. And now Bliss was more intrigued than ever.

  On their way back down south, Bliss had Bobby Dunne make a few calls on his mobile to find out which unit had responded to the accident in which Weller had died. The stretch of A16 just north of Spalding was on the wrong side of the Cambridgeshire/Lincolnshire border for Bliss’s liking, but having ascertained that at least one member of the responding team was currently on duty at the Spalding station, he drove straight there.

  ‘What do you think now?’ he asked Dunne. Allison Weller hadn’t been able to give them a great deal more information, but her impression regarding her husband’s state of mind had been extremely revealing. And once back in the car, Bliss had revealed his own line of thinking: that maybe the news item Weller had seen was the one featuring the remains discovered in Bretton Woods.

  ‘I think it’s more than interesting, boss. Interesting would have been him having something important enough to tell you that it got him nudged off the road. But if what he had to say was connected with your Jane Doe, then we have something very tasty on our hands.’

  Roads, hedgerow, fields and ditches fled by in a seamless blur, courtesy of Bliss’s advanced police driver training. He was out of practice and his card had elapsed a few years ago, but he retained a few old tricks and maintained a decent speed throughout the journey.

  ‘Unless it’s another extraordinary coincidence, I think it’s the only logical conclusion.’ Bliss shrugged, keeping both hands resting gently on the steering wheel. ‘But I can’t imagine what it was he needed to discuss that couldn’t have been said over the phone.’

  They arrived in Spalding shortly after three thirty. Sergeant Eddie Glazier was waiting for them in the rest room, his own curiosity obviously kept on the boil since being asked to remain in the station for their arrival. Glazier was as wide as Bobby Dunne, but was a good foot shorter. A pocket powerhouse was the term that came to most people’s minds when they met him for the first time. He wore tinted spectacles, and sported a three-day growth of stubble that had all the makings of a goatee. Bliss hoped the man changed his mind; goatee beards didn’t work on men above a certain age. They spanked of desperation, of rebellion quelled by life; a compromise on the midlife-crisis Harley.

  The rest room comprised a row of tables and chairs, and a TV hanging off a steel arm high up in one corner. The box was on, but the sound had been muted. There was no one else in the room, which adjoined a small and grubby-looking canteen.

  The three men shook hands and Bliss got right to it. ‘Tell me what you found,’ he said, once he’d explained his interest.

  ‘Mr Weller’s vehicle was on its roof some way off the road on a sloping hillside with a pretty steep incline,’ Glazier told them, his voice a deep Yorkshire growl. ‘Both sides of the car were battered, as was its roof. It was obvious that it had flipped over a few times on its way down the hill. Mr Weller was still in the vehicle, being held in place by his seat belt. The driver’s airbag had deployed, but the front offside and the offside door panels were crushed in on him. He was dead when we arrived on scene.’

  Bliss nodded, trying to picture it. ‘Was there any doubt in your mind about it being a single vehicle accident?’

  Glazier raked his nails through the mild growth of hair between his ear and chin. ‘It didn’t seem likely that another vehicle had been involved, no. The marks on the road surface seemed to suggest that Weller’s vehicle had moved off-line, the brakes were applied, but the severity of the movement caused the vehicle to spin and tumble off the road. The incline and gravity did the rest. We found no evidence of another vehicle, and I think we would, had someone else been involved.’

  Bliss knew these guys were experts at weighing up accident scenes,
but still he pushed on. ‘Did your accident investigation team agree with your initial findings?’

  ‘Completely. The fact is, all car debris found at the scene belonged to Weller’s vehicle. One set of tyre marks. One car down the hill.’

  During the drive down from Lincoln, Bliss had all but convinced himself that Weller’s car had been rammed off the road. Clearly the evidence did not support his line of thinking, and he now began to doubt his theory that Weller’s death was suspicious. Perhaps it was nothing more than a coincidence after all.

  ‘I take it no witnesses have come forward?’ Bliss asked.

  Glazier shook his head. His eyes became fixed. ‘That’s about the only odd thing regarding this accident. And very odd at that, now that I think about it a little more. The A16 is a well-used road in both directions, and it must be a rare occasion indeed when a car could have a shunt like that and there be no traffic moving either way along any stretch of it. It’s a first for me, that’s for sure.’

  And now there it was again. Yet another oddity, something out of kilter. Bliss pursed his lips and gave a long, puzzled sigh. ‘But in your opinion it’s not possible that another vehicle was responsible for Weller’s car ending up off the road?’

  Here, Glazier shook his head. Folded his arms. ‘I didn’t say it was impossible. Unlikely. Improbable, even. But it could be done if the other driver knew what he was about. If it was deliberate.’

  Bliss felt his heartbeat quicken. The door hadn’t completely slammed in his face. He glanced at Bobby, flashing a thin smile. Dunne gave an encouraging nod.

  ‘Tell me how that might be done,’ Bliss asked Glazier.

  Chapter 10

  Having arrived back in Peterborough shortly before five, Bliss first dropped Dunne off in the hotel car park to collect his Rover, then drove directly to Thorpe Wood HQ. On his way through from the car park, he bumped into Sergeant Grealish, the uniform who had given Penny a hard time. They were both using the short corridor between areas. The man was every bit as red and sweaty and Penny had described, and judging by the ripe aroma around him, Grealish had only a nodding acquaintance with deodorant.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ Bliss asked.

  Grealish brought his bulk to a juddering halt. His stomach continued to move after the rest of him. He nodded. ‘What’s up?’

  The two men stood like gunslingers waiting for the other to draw.

  ‘That depends. We may have a problem, but I think it can be resolved.’

  ‘Oh? What problem is that, then?’

  ‘You gave my DC a hard time this morning. Chandler is a good officer, and she doesn’t need that kind of shit. Not from you, not from anyone. She’s got a lot on her plate right now, and I want you to back off.’

  ‘She come running to you, did she? What, she can’t fight her own battles?’

  Bliss narrowed his gaze. ‘She likes to tough it out with people her own size. She’d have to put on two hundred pounds to do that with you.’

  Grealish started to turn away. ‘Yeah, whatever you…’

  Bliss put his arm out, blocking the man’s way. ‘I mean it. You give her a hard time again and I’ll come looking for you.’

  The sergeant took a step back, his face splitting into a wide grin. His tongue snaked out to moisten his lips. ‘Is that right? What’s up, Bliss?’ He formed an ‘O’ with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, and began slipping the middle finger of his other hand in and out of it. ‘You sticking it to her?’

  When Bliss hit the man he did so without warning. The punch jabbed out only from the hip, but it was powerful and caught Grealish just beneath the ribs. He doubled up as if cut in two, his breath emerging in one loud explosion of escaped air. Bliss put a hand on the man’s back, leaned down to speak.

  ‘You’re just winded, Grealish. You’ll be fine in a couple of minutes. Just suck in some air when you can, and straighten slowly. I’ll be going now, but if you want to discuss this matter again, you come and find me. If not, keep away from Penny Chandler and you and me won’t have any more problems.’

  Bliss patted Grealish on the shoulder and walked away, heading up to CID.

  Chandler was nowhere to be found, and the incident room was empty of all but two civilian administrators. Both looked up at Bliss and waved a greeting, which he returned. Already the room looked as if it had been taken over by savages, with plastic sandwich containers, open biscuit packets and chocolate bar wrappers spread all over the desks and floor. Cigarette smoke hung like strips of unwashed linen in the air, and the ashtrays looked as if they were stuffed with the cremated remains of several fat people. As a rule, Thorpe Wood was a non-smoking working environment, but incident rooms were considered a special case. Just popping his head in caused Bliss’s eyes to water and sting.

  In his office, Bliss checked through his written and e-mailed messages, but none of the subject headings were interesting enough to snag his full attention. If it was important, people would get back to him. There were several mails from Sykes, who was chasing him for an update, but Bliss deleted the messages. There had been no memos in his pigeonhole, and there were no new post-it notes stuck to his desk or laptop monitor. Two days into the investigation and information was proving hard to come by.

  As he sat at his desk and pondered the next move, Bliss was feeling a little guilty, wondering if he had given Jane Doe the attention she deserved. It was unlike him to go running off to chase down something which, at the time he’d made the decision, was entirely unconnected with the murder investigation in hand. Lacking focus at this relatively early stage was not a good sign. With the guilt came the inevitable second-guessing, and the usual doubts began to seep back beneath the thin veneer of optimism he’d built up.

  Even so, there did now seem to be a connection after all. Bliss was convinced that Bernard Weller had seen a news item featuring the discovery of the remains over at Bretton Woods, and that the unearthing of Jane Doe had prompted both a change in the man’s mood and the subsequent phone call requesting a meeting. Whatever information Weller had decided to share with Bliss had probably died with him, though there was a chance that a search of Weller’s home might reveal something useful.

  Bliss’s mind tracked back to the possibilities Sergeant Glazier had outlined to him and Bobby Dunne: that a trained driver could nudge someone off the road without causing a lot of damage to their own vehicle. Many highway patrol officers in the USA used the technique to end car chases. It was all about getting the angles right rather than adopting a method that relied on brute force, Glazier explained, and while the sergeant didn’t believe such an incident was responsible for Weller’s death, he could not rule out the possibility. That was enough for Bliss to latch on to. Keen to develop more leads, he took a slip of paper from his pocket and called Allison Weller’s number.

  ‘Mrs Weller? It’s DI Bliss. Sorry to bother you again, but I was wondering if your husband owned a mobile phone.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

  ‘Would it be all right by you if I had the number and the name of his service provider?’

  Allison Weller gave him the information. ‘What’s this all about, Inspector? I may be grieving at the moment, but I still have my wits about me. I noticed unspoken messages passing between you and Sergeant Dunne. Something is going on and I’d like to know what it is.’

  Bliss paused. There was a need to be guarded, but Weller’s widow was owed some sort of explanation. Besides, he wanted to search through her husband’s possessions and needed her on his side.

  ‘I’m not exactly sure,’ he replied gently. ‘The fact is, I’m concerned about Bernard’s accident. I’d prefer it if you kept this to yourself for the time being, Allison, but I’m wondering if there was more to it than simply running off the road. There are a few too many coincidences for my liking.’

  ‘Are you saying you think another vehicle may have been involved?’

  ‘Possibly, yes.’

  ‘And that Bernie’s death may hav
e been… deliberate?’

  ‘It’s only supposition at this stage, Allison.’

  There was a brief moment of silence. Then Allison Weller asked, ‘But why would anyone want my husband dead, Inspector? He’s been retired for more than a year.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to speculate at this stage. Some criminals have long memories, of course, but I can assure you that I’m going to look into this. For a number of reasons, I can’t make it official at this stage, but I will be spending time searching for answers.’

  ‘I… I’m shocked by this, Inspector.’ Her voice sounded weak, and Bliss felt responsible for a grief renewed. He pictured her fragile features. ‘I’m still coming to terms with losing Bernie, and now you’re telling me he may have been murdered.’

  The alarm in her voice made Bliss wish he’d said nothing. He had to calm her down. ‘Allison, please understand that I’m by no means certain about any of this, and I have absolutely no proof of anything untoward. This is just me, the opinion of one man, and at the moment it’s based on nothing more than pure instinct.’

  ‘A gut feeling? Yes, Bernie put great store in those.’ He heard the reflection in her voice, the sense of loss. At some stage it was going to hit her that she would never share moments with her husband again. Bliss thought that point was still some way off.

  ‘It’s a policeman’s lot, I’m afraid. We’re suspicious by nature. And I could still be completely wrong.’

  There was a pause long enough for Bliss to grow concerned. But when she spoke again, Allison Weller’s voice was much softer. ‘I’m sure you’ll do what’s best for my husband, Inspector Bliss. You’ll keep me informed, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘How will this affect the procedure? I had hoped Bernie’s body would be released to me within a day or two, but if you now believe there may be suspicious circumstances…’

  Bliss hadn’t considered this aspect. Allison Weller was right. Yet Bliss remained convinced that it would be a mistake to make his suspicions formal at this juncture. This was a decision he would have to live with.