Bad to the Bone

by Tony J. Forder

  ‘But am I right?’ she demanded to know.

  Bliss was thrilled at the sight of her flushed cheeks, the enthusiasm, commitment and, it had to be acknowledged, emotion and compassion. DC Chandler was going places. But only if he could nurse her through this mess.

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘You’re right. So what are we going to do about it?’

  Chandler came back to her seat alongside Dunne. She shook her head, folding her arms. ‘There’s one obvious problem: and that’s if someone else hooks into the information we have. Mia obviously found out about Alan Dean while she was chasing up records relating to the MisPer report. If she, or anyone else on the squad, gets wind of Weller’s death as well, they’re going to bring it to our attention. We’ll have no choice but to follow it through then.’

  Dunne was nodding. ‘That’s a real possibility. But the fact that both the reported accident involving Jodie and the MisPer report were handled by Bridge Street Central works in our favour. Of all the officers involved, the only one I really knew well was Alan Dean. I probably bumped into the others from time to time, as you do, and I got to know Bernie a little, but then I’ve only ever been stationed here.’

  ‘How does that work to our advantage?’ Chandler wanted to know.

  It was Bliss who answered her. ‘Because it’ll be harder for someone to put the pieces together the way we have without knowing what the finished picture is. Few serving officers currently stationed at Thorpe Wood will have known both Weller and Alan Dean. Certainly not well enough to be aware that both have been recently killed.’

  ‘So it’ll buy us some time, at least.’

  ‘It should. And remember, the actions for tracing and interviewing both Weller and Hendry are down to us, so we can write up what we like when we like.’

  Dunne raised a finger. ‘That’s true enough, boss. But what about Hendry? He was at the scene that night with Weller, and according to McAndrew, the witness, it was Hendry who later warned him off. Hendry may also be in danger.’

  Bliss nodded. ‘You’re right, Bobby. Absolutely. My fault for not picking up on that earlier. Of course, we have to assume that Weller was only murdered because he was coming to see me, possibly to confess his part in whatever took place that night. My guess is Hendry is likely to remain safe provided he doesn’t contact us.’

  ‘Even so…’

  ‘I know. Whoever’s behind this might not take that chance. We hadn’t heard from this Alan Dean, either. Okay, we’ll attend to it tomorrow. Along with everything else.’

  ‘So what exactly are we all going to be doing?’ Chandler asked.

  ‘How about I take Hendry, boss,’ Bobby Dunne suggested. ‘I can also spend some more time going back through archives. Seems to me that with the initial mowing down of the poor kid and the subsequent MisPer, we’ve raised a few different names internally. What would be good now is to turn up one that spreads over both inquiries.’

  ‘Good call, Bobby,’ Bliss nodded his approval. Things were coming together fast. He felt his flesh prickle. ‘You get on to that first thing after briefing tomorrow. Locate Hendry, have a word, then do some digging. Pen, your reward is to head up to Lincoln and go through Weller’s house, particularly his office, see what you can come up with.’

  ‘Okay. It’ll be a nice change of scenery. What will you be focusing on?’

  Bliss was ready for the question. He had made up his mind about this almost from the moment Bobby had told them about it. ‘I’m going to look into this Alan Dean shooting. I think we would all agree this was no burglary gone wrong. And a deliberate shooting might be easier to prove than a deliberate forcing off the road. I have a feeling, just a few raised hairs on the back of my neck, that one of us is going to come up smelling of roses tomorrow.’

  ‘Losers buy drinks and dinner,’ Chandler suggested, smiling at them both. ‘So you two get your flexible friends ready.’

  Bliss laughed. He was grateful to Penny for lightening the mood. ‘From anyone else that would have sounded crude.’

  ‘And how did it sound from me?’

  ‘As innocent as Snow White herself.’

  He winked at Dunne, who said, ‘Yeah, and we all know how she drifted.’

  Chapter 22

  Once renowned for its field of concrete cows welcoming visitors to the town, Milton Keynes was now better known for being the roundabout capital of England. Bliss lost track of how many he’d navigated through since crossing the M1 and hitting the town’s ring road, and even the satnav was finding it hard to cope. The Bradwell area he sought was located in the centre of Milton Keynes, and, after a couple of aborted attempts and three-point turns, Bliss finally pulled up outside Alan Dean’s terraced house. Dean’s home was a relatively older property in what looked to be a modern township, the so-called progress seeming ugly to Bliss.

  He sat and gathered his wits for a few moments. So far the morning had been one to forget; starting with a thirty minute bout of vertigo that took him from nausea to vomiting, resulting in a late team briefing during which he had felt close to being overwhelmed by the symptoms of his disease, and culminating in an arse-puckering near miss in the pool car when a white-van man almost sideswiped him on a dual carriageway. Reflecting on how awful he’d felt when waking up that morning, Bliss began to question how long he’d be able to keep the illness from his employers, particularly if the episodes of vertigo increased in either number or duration. Or worse still, both. The imbalance was a symptom he might be able to adapt to and disguise, fatigue something he would have to somehow push his way through, but attacks of vertigo, such as he’d experienced upon rising from his bed, were completely incapacitating.

  Drawing in a good lungful of air, Bliss climbed out of the silver Ford Focus and headed over to the house, outside which a uniform stood like a royal guardsman. Bliss had earlier made a call to Milton Keynes CID, and he now flashed his warrant card and asked if DCI Radcliffe had arrived as arranged. The constable directed Bliss through to the back garden, where two suits stood smoking, despite a steady drizzle misting the air around them.

  The DCI and his colleague, DS King, greeted Bliss warmly, but he sensed a wariness in them that he’d half expected and could empathise with. When he’d called moments after ending the squad briefing, he’d given them the cover story that Alan Dean was an ex-colleague, explaining that all he wanted to do was chat about the circumstances of the shooting, perhaps take a look around at the scene while he was there. Like most cops, these two looked uncomfortable at having an outsider on their patch, an interloper who might snoop and seek out errors in the way the investigation was being run. Keen to move beyond their discomfort, the first thing Bliss did was assure them that this was not the reason he had driven over. The moment he saw the two officers visibly relax, he jumped in with both feet.

  ‘This notion of a robbery gone bad,’ he said, arching his eyebrows, ‘it’s a load of bollocks, right? I mean, you two don’t look as if you’ve been fast-tracked straight from university and are now flying by the seat of your pants, cribbing from a text book.’

  Radcliffe and King exchanged uneasy glances. After a telling pause, it was the DS who spoke up. ‘You’re spot on about the last part, but I’m not sure why you think the robbery angle is out of the question.’

  Bliss pursed his lips. Shrugged. ‘Experience. Law of averages. I’ve been in the job almost twenty years, fourteen of them suited and booted, and I have never encountered a house breaker shooting someone. I know it has happened on the odd occasion, but I think it’s unlikely in this case.’

  ‘So this could be the exception that proves the rule,’ Radcliffe suggested. He flicked his cigarette away in a shower of tiny sparks.

  The two CID officers were like a couple of junkyard dogs: one all taut and bullish like a Doberman, the other jerky and skittish like a Jack Russell.

  Unwilling to reveal the link between Alan Dean and Bernard Weller, Bliss merely gave a wry smile and said nothing. His eyes spoke eloquently and f
orcefully, however.

  ‘Okay, you’re right,’ DCI Radcliffe, the Doberman, admitted. ‘Everyone who has taken a look at this has come to the same conclusion: a hit. Careless tossing of the place afterwards to make it look like a robbery, but whoever did it had no heart for the deception. They did what they came to do.’

  ‘A hit?’ Bliss wasn’t prepared for them knocking it out of the ground with the first swipe. He had hoped they would stroke it around a bit first. Now he had to try and finesse this a little. ‘You think Alan made an enemy recently?’

  Radcliffe frowned. ‘Sergeant Dean turned a key in the local courthouse. It’s not the kind of place you make enemies.’

  ‘Maybe his troubles kicked off before he moved here,’ DS King suggested. He peered at Bliss over his boss’s shoulder. ‘Back in Peterborough.’

  Oh, shit, Bliss thought. This wasn’t going at all well. He shook his head forcefully. ‘Alan transferred to Milton Keynes six years ago. Who would hold a grudge that long?’

  ‘Someone who’s been banged up?’ King glanced across at his DCI. ‘Perhaps we ought to be looking at who Dean put away before he bailed out to become a jailer.’

  It was time to be a little more insistent. ‘Wait a minute,’ Bliss said. ‘Why are you so desperate to move this away from your own patch? You can’t possibly have run down all aspects of Dean’s life here in just a few days. This shooting could have been over anything.’

  Radcliffe picked up on the slip right away. ‘Dean? What happened to Alan? Just how close were you two, anyway?’

  Bliss felt like slapping himself. Such an amateurish mistake. He’d blown this, big time. Blundering in without a plan.

  ‘All right. Alan Dean and I were not actually colleagues. We only got to hear about the shooting yesterday, and one of my DSs had a word with me about it. He and Dean did work together. He latched on to the bogus burglary claim right away, and wanted to check it out. But he’s tied up today, and anyway we thought I might have a bit more clout.’

  ‘Why the pretence?’ Radcliffe wanted to know.

  The drizzle was becoming more insistent, droplets tap-tapping on the heavy plastic covering Alan Dean’s garden furniture. Bliss hunched deeper into his long jacket.

  ‘I didn’t want you to think I was trying to muscle in or pull the case down around you. It seemed easier just to go with the colleagues story.’ Bliss gave half a smile and shrugged. ‘It wasn’t much of a plan.’

  ‘This DS back at your place,’ King asked. ‘Did he have any ideas about who might want Dean topped?’

  Bliss saw an opportunity to pull this around after all. ‘No. We talked about it, obviously, and he couldn’t think of anything. In fact, he was firm about it. Alan Dean was a uniform, a beat and desk man. Any arrests he made were strictly low-level collars.’

  ‘Was he gay?’

  ‘Gay? Why would you ask that?’

  ‘The man was still single at his age. Lived alone. It’s a theory, that’s all.’

  Bliss shook his head. ‘I really don’t know anything about his private life. I’m not sure my DS did, either. They were colleagues, not close friends.’

  ‘No rumours? Drugs? Kiddies? We’re looking for a motive here, Bliss. Someone went to the trouble of taking him out. There had to be a good reason.’

  ‘And I still think you’ll find that reason somewhere here,’ Bliss argued. He was starting to feel uncomfortable, but decided to push it anyway. ‘From what I can gather, and judging by my sergeant’s concern, Alan Dean was well liked and respected. He was good at his job and he did it without ruffling any feathers. So, if we can concentrate on the here and now for the time being, any chance of you telling me what you have so far?’

  ‘Other than suspecting it was a hit?’ DCI Radcliffe shook his head. ‘Fuck all just about sums it up. Door-to-door came up empty, forensics the same. We’ve found nothing in Dean’s personal possessions or his phone records to lead us anywhere. I’ve been in touch with a CHIS who would know if there had been any talk, any money changing hands for a local hitman. Nothing.’

  Bliss thought about this. CHIS: a Covert Human Intelligence Source – modern parlance for a snout, or an informant. He could not abide this aspect of modern policing. It seemed to him that the top brass were never happier than when they were thinking up new and meaningless acronyms.

  Bliss rubbed the scar on his forehead, chewed on his bottom lip for a few seconds. He’d been hoping for a witness or two, someone he could visit in his own time to see what they knew, but this was getting him nowhere. He felt a slight pull of guilt in not telling these two fellow officers what he knew, helping their inquiry rather than focusing solely on his own. But he was convinced that throwing it open to a full investigation at this stage would lead to it being buried beneath a sea of internal bureaucracy. He hadn’t known Alan Dean at all and, while he’d worked with Weller only the once, he felt he owed the two murdered men his best efforts.

  ‘You seem to have everything in hand. I won’t waste any more of your time. Mind if I look around?’ Bliss asked.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Radcliffe said. He took a card from his breast pocket and handed it over. ‘We’ve got to shoot off. Give me a call if you want anything else, or if you can think of anything from your end that might help.’

  ‘Yeah, will do. I doubt I’ll find anything here, but I said I’d do what I could. I’ll check into a few things back home, make sure Dean’s past is looked into. That okay by you?’

  ‘Sure. Saves us a job.’

  With the heating having been switched off for a few days, it wasn’t a great deal warmer inside the house. But it was dry, and there was no wind. Because a murder had been carried out, Bliss knew the search of the house would have been thorough. Even so, he spent some time checking in less obvious locations, though he had no idea what he might find. If this had gone down the way he thought it had, Alan Dean had been given no warning of the hit.

  As he picked his way through the minutiae of Alan Dean’s life, Bliss grew reflective. There was an emptiness in the murdered man’s home that suggested a lack of companionship, an overwhelming sense of loneliness. The fridge held only a few basic items, the cupboards contained a mismatch of plates and bowls, the drainer by the sink a single plate, one cup, one knife and one fork. Bliss couldn’t help projecting ahead and seeing himself in Dean’s shoes, growing old on his own, retiring in the knowledge that he would live out his years alone.

  Alan Dean is not you, Bliss told himself. And you will not be him.

  But he wasn’t sure he believed the voice inside his head.

  Bliss stood for a while in the hallway. According to the SOCO report, Dean had met his death soon after entering his home after a night out with friends. The gunman had been waiting behind the front door. For another victim the shooter might have hidden in one of the rooms, but a good pro would have allowed for a cop’s instincts.

  Blood, bone and brain matter still stained the wall and floor of the hallway. Samples for forensic examination had been taken of each, but the larger mass decorated the hall like Jackson Pollock’s vision of hell. Had Alan Dean known the man who took his life? Bliss asked himself. Had Dean peered into familiar eyes? The gunshots from behind suggested otherwise. Bliss left feeling angry and wondering where this was headed and who might be next on the hitman’s list.

  He was approaching the M1 turnoff when he took a call from Mia Strong. ‘I’ve managed to track down the dealer,’ she told Bliss. ‘This Snake gimp. He’s actually retired from his upstanding profession and is now – get this – an adviser for a drugs rehab centre in Northampton. You want him pulled in?’

  Bliss worked the idea for a few seconds. There was a lot of procedure involved, plus the not inconsiderable matter of human resources, in taking someone off the streets and bringing them into custody. The alternative was to send someone to speak with the former dealer, and Mia was perfectly up to the task. But with the motorway looming up, Bliss knew he could be speaking to the man face to face
in less than half an hour.

  ‘Give me the details,’ he told Strong. ‘I’ll pay him a visit myself.’

  Gordon Wilson, aka Snake, worked in a community centre near the Park Campus of Northampton’s university. Now aged forty, Wilson had been counselling and advising on drugs matters for more than five years. His own rehabilitation had come about during an eighteen-month prison sentence, during which he met the woman who had subsequently become both his mentor and lover.

  When Bliss arrived unannounced at Wilson’s place of work, the adviser was shut away in a room with a student from the nearby university. Bliss waited patiently outside in the scruffy hallway, his attention snagged by the centre’s hall in which a number of youths gathered to play pool. Faces turned his way and immediately hardened, as if sensing who and what he was.

  Bliss used the waiting time to think about what Gordon Wilson might be achieving here. Working this closely with addicts might present the perfect opportunity to fall back into familiar ways. It was actually the perfect cover.

  Ever the cynic, Bliss chided himself.

  The first thing that took Bliss by surprise, when he was finally shown in to see Wilson, was how healthy the man looked. Not all dealers were users, but at the level this man had worked, the chances were good that he had been jabbing his arm every bit as much as his clients. Bliss had been expecting a reed-thin, pallid individual, full of facial tics and nervous sweats. But Wilson was a sturdy man, well-nourished and obviously fit and strong if his handshake was anything to go by. The second surprise was that Wilson welcomed Bliss with a warm smile that seemed genuine.

  ‘Good to meet you, Inspector,’ Wilson said. His Lancashire accent was less of a surprise, Mia Strong having fed Bliss as much information as she could over the phone.

  ‘You don’t know why I’m here, yet.’

  ‘True, but why should that alter how I feel?’

  Bliss looked around the small, yet neat office. ‘You’ve come a long way,’ he said.