Bad to the Bone

by Tony J. Forder

  ‘I’ve been busy, Jimmy. With my own work. But it’s just about there. I can have it done tonight if you need me to.’

  Bliss shook his head. ‘No, that’s fine. You get it to me when you can. I just wanted to make sure that you hadn’t mailed or faxed it in.’

  ‘No. It’s sitting on my laptop at home.’ She narrowed her gaze. ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘If it’s not urgent, why did you want to know if I’d already submitted it?’

  ‘I needed to be sure that no one else had seen it. There’s something I have to know. Something I need you to tell me.’

  ‘About the burial sites? The poor girl herself?’

  Bliss nodded. ‘Yes, it’s about Jodie. I need you to tell me everything that happened to her. And I mean everything.’

  After thanking Emily and leaving her perhaps more confused than she had been upon being dragged away from her work to see him, Bliss spent the next couple of hours making calls and driving to three separate locations. First there was a trip to Werrington. This was followed by a drive out of the city to Whittlesey. Finally, after a short stop off to check on the Labs, he drove to a secluded location just a few miles from Stilton. Each additional piece of information he gleaned during those hours, each suspicion he confirmed, both convinced and saddened him more. The truth, at last, was unravelling. In the end, he’d been wrong. About everything and almost everyone.

  Travelling back towards Thorpe Wood, Bliss received a call on his mobile. It was from Emily.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, delighted to hear from her, though his thoughts still lay elsewhere. ‘How are you? Missing me already?’

  ‘I was okay. In fact, I was feeling pretty good,’ Emily replied. ‘And yes, I was missing you. At the time that seemed like a good thing.’ There was something in her voice that caught his attention.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked. ‘You sound angry.’

  ‘The Evening Telegraph is what’s up.’

  Bliss’s heart seemed to suddenly lurch between no beats and far too many. ‘What does it say?’ he managed to ask.

  She told him. It was everything Sheryl Craig had suggested would be in her original piece. Everything he’d expected not to see in print. Bliss felt the shadow of guilt press against him, its touch devastating. He’d acted foolishly, and now it was time to pay.

  ‘Are you asking me if it’s true?’

  ‘I’m not really sure, Jimmy. I refuse to believe the man I spent time with is a murderer, but you know what they say about smoke and fire?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with the murder of Connie Rawlings,’ Bliss insisted, his voice cracking.

  There was silence for a moment. When she spoke again, Emily’s voice was even less certain. ‘That sounds terribly specific, Jimmy.’

  Bliss chewed on his lower lip. The easy thing, maybe even the kindest thing, would be to lie. But he liked Emily, and he thought maybe they had a shot at something. Yet he was unwilling to build that relationship on the foundation of deceit.

  ‘There was something,’ he heard himself say. His eyes focused on other vehicles flashing by, but his mind was anywhere but on his driving. ‘Something stupid. It was brief and it was unthinking. It fulfilled a need. Nothing more.’

  ‘It sounds cold. But the question now, and the answer that matters most of all, is when? When did this brief, unthinking need take place? Before or after you started seeing me?’

  Again he could not tell her a lie. ‘After.’

  Another silence followed, one neither of them seemed to want to fill. In Bliss’s heart he knew anything he might have to say would be crass and trite right now.

  ‘Don’t call me,’ Emily finally said. And the phone was dead in his hands.

  A familiar tone sounded. A missed call, but with a voice message left. Feeling numb on so many levels, Bliss thumbed a speed-dial number and listened to his message. It was from Sheryl Craig.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bliss, but my paper ran the piece. I tried to get it stopped, but while I was confirming what you said, the decision to go to print was made by my editor. A detraction will run in later editions and in tomorrow’s paper, of course. Please believe me when I say I tried.’

  A retraction, he thought miserably.

  Too fucking late.

  Bliss could not believe how badly this day had turned out. He felt overwhelmed by everything that was happening both to him and around him. When he had calmed himself enough to think more rationally, Bliss placed a call to Bobby Dunne.

  ‘The other brass, Jodie Maybanks’s friend,’ he said. ‘Her name is Simone Jackson. I’ve arranged a meet. You want in?’

  ‘Absolutely. You want me to let Penny know?’

  ‘No need. Let’s see what this woman has for us first.’ He gave Dunne the place and time. When he ended the call he sat in his car for a few moments, thinking about Jodie Maybanks and Connie Rawlings. Connie had asked him to find Jodie’s killer.

  ‘This is for both of you,’ he whispered to himself. Hoping they could both hear.

  Chapter 36

  When the complex array of bridges, tunnels and roundabouts were completed at Norman’s Cross in order to alleviate a traffic bottleneck on the A1, the developers left part of an access road behind. It went nowhere, dead-ending at a field, and was often used by police patrol cars and RAC or AA mechanics to rest up between calls. It was here that Bliss and Dunne met, the DS sliding into the passenger seat alongside Bliss in the pool car.

  According to the Ford’s dashboard clock, Simone Jackson was a few minutes late. Bobby Dunne glanced across at Bliss. ‘You’re quiet, boss. You think she might not show.’

  Bliss shifted in his seat, facing his colleague. It had been a long time since he’d felt this way, so close to losing himself to rage. Part of him just wanted to give in to it and let the chips fall where they may, but he got a grip and steadied his breathing. ‘She’s not coming, Bobby.’

  ‘What? Then why are we still here. Let’s go pull her in?’

  ‘No, I mean she never was coming. I’ve already spoken with her, as a matter of fact. Earlier today.’

  Dunne turned, the Focus lurching as he moved. ‘I don’t understand. You said we were going to do this together.’

  ‘I know what I said. I lied. It turns out that Simone knew Jodie very well. And fortunately for me, she also has a pretty good memory for faces. I showed her the mugshots and asked her to pick out Jodie’s regular. I included one of Rhodes and one of Flynn. I also included one of yours. Can you guess which one she pointed at, Bobby?’

  Dunne sat and stared at him. His chin jutted out, and a tic began to pulse in his cheek.

  ‘Why did you do it, Bobby? And please,’ Bliss put up a hand and shook his head, ‘don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. Let’s be adult about this. Tell me everything. Make me understand.’

  Bobby Dunne’s expression didn’t alter in the slightest. By way of a response he dug his hand in his coat pocket, and a moment later took out an automatic pistol. He didn’t point it at Bliss, choosing instead to rest it on his thigh, finger locked around the trigger. The threat was implicit.

  ‘You going to use that on me now?’ Bliss asked.

  ‘It’s just for a little protection while we work something out here.’

  ‘I’m unarmed, Bobby.’

  ‘Still… I feel better having this edge.’

  ‘You’ll need it. So go on then, Bobby. Tell me about it. Explain it to me if you can.’

  Dunne nodded. ‘I imagine you must feel very let down right now. But you know, I was only one of many coppers sticking it to Jodie Maybanks. According to her, though, I was the only one doing her bareback, without a condom that is. She told me she was in the club and that I was the father. She wanted money, I wanted her to get rid of it. That night in June nineteen ninety, we’d argued again about it and before storming off up the street she threatened to go to my bosses and the newspapers. I chased after her in the motor, and then she just walked out
into the road in front of me. I clipped her, and could see she was hurt, but not too badly. Jodie was shocked and silent, though. I bundled her into the car. She was lucid enough to carry on screaming at me, and then she passed out. I had to be at work, and frankly I didn’t have a clue what to do about the mess I’d got myself into. I was out of my depth. So I stopped and put her in the boot and then drove to Bridge Street to see Clive. He was about to end his shift, and because we’d done a bit of wheeling and dealing together and had become mates, I asked him to take care of Jodie for me.’

  Dunne set his chin even more and shook his head. ‘No, not to kill her. We were clear on that. He was to persuade Jodie to leave, even give her a bung if needed, and if I’m honest I didn’t think too much about what form that persuasion might take. But Clive came to me the next day and told me that Jodie had gone berserk when she came round, making more wild threats, this time involving him as well. Then Clive admitted to strangling Jodie and burying her over by the lake.’

  Bliss tried imagining each event as Dunne described it. He could see the logic, the panic, the mistakes, the way the situation had spiralled out of control. He could also see the heartless treatment of a young girl, the abuse and dismissal of her life as if it meant nothing.

  ‘You want to put that gun away now?’ Bliss asked. ‘It’s making me nervous.’

  Dunne shook his head. ‘No. Not just yet.’

  ‘Okay. So tell me about the others, Bobby. How were they all involved?’

  But Dunne wasn’t having that. His fixed gaze narrowed. ‘No. You tell me how you came to suspect me. What made you add my mugshot to the others?’

  ‘All right. It was something you said. Actually, a couple of somethings, throwaway comments that meant nothing to me at the time, yet nagged at me somewhere in the back of my mind. Because I went to see Flynn after I’d spoken to you in the canteen, I thought it had to be some remark he had made. But when it finally came to me I realised it was when you asked me whether Chandler and I had enjoyed ourselves in Sunny Hunny.’

  Dunne blinked a couple of times. Nodded. ‘Ah. I shouldn’t have known you were there, should I?’

  ‘No. Neither I nor Penny had seen you to tell you where we were going, and I doubted that anyone from Hunstanton had told you. I admit it didn’t seem much to go on at first, just an oddity, a puzzle in need of solving at some point. But it got me running our discussion through the cogs, and that was when the clincher hit me. When you were talking about your interview with Hendry, you mentioned laying it on thick, telling him about the fractures and broken arm. I had to keep coming back to that, because you see, Bobby, I had no idea Jodie’s arm had been broken that night. I couldn’t recall Emily mentioning it, and it certainly wasn’t ever discussed at briefing. So if there was no record of it, how could you have known?

  ‘At first the answer appeared obvious: you were either wrong or you’d exaggerated the injuries to Hendry. But then I put that together with you somehow knowing where Penny and I spent our afternoon yesterday, and I became extremely curious. So I spoke with Emily. She confirmed that Jodie had broken her arm, and that the lack of healing meant she had died shortly afterwards. Emily also confirmed that she hadn’t mentioned it before, nor had her report been completed.’

  Dunne heaved a sigh heavy with resignation. ‘I got a bit carried away telling you about Hendry. The Hunstanton slip was relatively minor, but knowing that arm was broken is impossible to talk my way out of.’

  Bliss nodded. ‘Yes. It’s way too late for that. I didn’t see the whole story right away, because I still couldn’t completely accept your involvement. Not in something like that. So I put my mind to what you had been doing throughout the case. It was you who turned up the missing files in the first place, of course, and then again earlier today. Still there wasn’t enough there to convince me of your involvement. I felt something had to be wrong, but didn’t want to believe where it was headed.’

  Bliss shifted slightly in his seat, eyes on the gun in Bobby’s hand. He looked outside at the encroaching mist, wishing it would seep in and swallow them both up. His throat felt dry, but now that he had fashioned this meeting, he was determined to have his say. He glanced across at Dunne when he spoke.

  ‘Coming back to your involvement with the investigation, I wondered about your interviews with Hendry, so I made a call to RAF Wittering. They told me Hendry was based in Germany and had been for the past four months. It seems to me that posting may have saved his life. But now there seemed to be no question about your involvement. Somehow you knew me and Penny had been to Hunstanton, you’d lied about interviewing Hendry, and you’d turned up the records that first pointed us at Flynn and then later away from him again. I went over it time and again. Only then did it occur to me that everything you’d said about either Flynn or Rhodes could just as easily have applied to you.

  ‘So I went to see Simone Jackson on my own, and she fingered you right away when I showed her the photos. You’d used Flynn’s name while you were seeing Jodie Maybanks. I guessed then that you must have forged the files supposedly completed by Flynn. I still don’t understand that, Bobby. Why did you do that?’

  Dunne heaved a sigh. Though resigned, he seemed curiously at peace. ‘Clive had done a runner, and I thought the best thing I could do was keep your mind off him until I could track him down. I knew if you had time to think about it you’d see his absence from work as more than coincidence, so I had to make you look elsewhere while I put things together. If you’d collared Rhodes he would have coughed. I needed to protect myself. As you rightly guessed, when I was seeing Jodie I used Flynn’s name – all us coppers used other names when we humping brasses. I didn’t have much time to come up with a better plan, but in the end I really thought you’d dump the case once you thought Flynn might be responsible. I thought that would be the end of it. I couldn’t believe it when you said you were going to carry on.’

  ‘You took a hell of a risk.’

  ‘Yeah. I called the play, and it came back to bite me.’

  Bliss nodded. ‘Tell me it wasn’t you who took out Weller and Dean.’

  ‘It wasn’t. You believe what you want, but that was Clive. We’d used Weller, Hendry and Dean back in nineteen ninety, but all they knew at the time was that a colleague wanted those two cases buried. A while after, Clive, Bernie and Alan Dean spent some time together and it was then that Weller and Dean guessed what had happened. No details, of course, only that the two cases were linked and now a whore was missing. Clive decided to apply a little pressure, making them both realise that they might be in the frame, that it could look as if they’d covered up a murder.’

  ‘You bought them off?’

  ‘Dean, yes. Bernie refused to accept cash. Blood money, he called it. But it was agreed that everyone would keep quiet about it. They knew, or at least guessed, what might happen if they didn’t. It was Alan Dean who panicked when the IKEA building was about to go up. Clive had told him where the body was buried, so Dean dug her up and moved her to Bretton Woods. Then it all hit the fan when those remains were found last week. We never discussed it, but it had to be Clive who took care of Bernie and Alan.’

  His direct gaze flickered for a moment. ‘I made sure he only warned you and Penny off. Clive was all for taking you two out as well, but I wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘So you were in contact, then?’

  ‘Text only at first. Clive was scared. He knew if he spoke to me he’d cave.’

  ‘Why did you put the block on me and Penny being killed, too?’

  Dunne gave a shrug. ‘I like you. You and Penny both. I didn’t think we had to go that far with you two. I thought I could make it work. I still thought you’d back away from Flynn’s supposed guilt.’

  ‘And you almost did make it work. So in the end, Rhodes was responsible for all the murders.’

  ‘Yes. It’s the truth, Jimmy.’

  ‘No,’ Bliss snapped, shaking his head. ‘Only my friends get to call me Jimmy. But that�
�s not quite all, is it? Because Rhodes didn’t shoot his wife, didn’t commit suicide, did he, Bobby? I think you murdered them both.’

  Dunne turned away for the first time, staring ahead through the windscreen. ‘You think what you like.’

  ‘I will. I think that once you realised the whole Flynn issue had got out of your control, you saw the chance to lay it all on Rhodes. But for that to work you had to get rid of him. And you couldn’t know what he’d told his wife over the years, so you had to do her as well. I’m not saying it came easy to you, but I’m sure you did it.’

  ‘What if I said it was to save you and Penny, not to make things easier for me? Would that make a difference?’

  ‘Difference?’

  ‘How you think of me.’

  Bliss shook his head. ‘No. You may not have murdered Jodie Maybanks, Weller or Dean, but you knew all along who did and you hid behind it.’

  ‘Okay. You’re right. It doesn’t make any difference now, so yeah, I killed Clive and Chloe. He called me, and I instructed him to make the hit on you and Penny. I did that just to make him let his guard down, never intending for him to get that far. He let slip where he was staying, and I made sure I got to him before he got to you.’

  Bliss put back his head. ‘What a sorry fucking mess. I can’t believe I was so wrong about you, Bobby. I would have bet my life on you being a straight copper.’

  ‘You remember that it was Rhodes who started it all.’

  ‘Yeah, and it was you who ended it. The irony is that Jodie’s murder is about the only one you played no part in.’

  Dunne shook his head. ‘Jesus. All this over a fucking tart.’

  Bliss pulled back his hand as far as the confines of the vehicle would allow, then slammed his fist into Dunne’s cheekbone. The big man barely flinched, but he looked at Bliss as if he were a madman.

  ‘You crazy fuck! I’m the one sitting here with a gun in my hand.’

  Bliss hit him again, harder this time, feeling the blow bite deep into his knuckles. ‘And that’s for Connie Rawlings,’ he said. ‘Rhodes might have been the one who killed her, but he did it on your say so.’