by Lisa Cutts
As I continued to read, though, I realised that there was only one problem with that. Errol was dead.
23
Harry, my DS, came into the room while I was submerged in the CAD reports, picking my way through last month’s calls relating to deaths of young people due to drug overdoses. He took a seat beside me as I continued to trawl through the information amassing on the screen.
‘How’s the historic train crash investigation going, Nina?’ he asked, pointedly.
‘Been looking at this,’ I said.
‘I can see that. Any particular reason you’re not doing the job you’re supposed to be doing?’ he asked, rubbing the stubble on his chin with his hand.
‘Yeah, Harry. Because I never do what I’m told to do. It’s the wondrous unpredictability of me. Take a look at this.’ I pointed at the screen to the call made by Errol at 18.56 on the twelfth of the month. ‘When patrols and the ambulance were en route, Errol Chandler, the lad making the call, said that his mate was unconscious and had been sick. He was near to hysterics. When the patrol arrived at the same time as the ambulance at 19.02 hours, Errol was dead on the floor, shirt off on a particularly cold evening, having suffered a cardiac arrest.’
I turned in my seat to look at Harry and to tell him to stop rubbing his stubble. The noise was putting me off. His answer was, ‘Stop moaning,’ followed by, ‘I remember this call being discussed at one of the morning meetings. There was a lot of confusion, as the kid we’d originally thought was going to die, Sidney Manning, was found unconscious but after a hospital stay he was discharged home to his parents. Errol Chandler, meanwhile, was dead on arrival in A&E.’
‘But he’d been alive minutes earlier, shouting and swearing into the telephone. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?’
Harry began his chin-scratching again. I slapped his hand.
‘Well, you’ve heard of Acute Behaviour Disturbance?’ Harry asked.
I didn’t have the foggiest what he was talking about but didn’t want to admit it. I shifted my weight to the armrest furthest away from Harry and nodded as wisely as I could manage. ‘Don’t forget that I’ve been off for a while and clearly expect that, as my supervisor, you should fully appraise me of the situation.’
With a look full of malevolence, he said, ‘Cut the management bullshit. There’s enough of that from management. It’s also called Excited Delirium. Basically, it’s often mistaken for a violent person resisting arrest. The person has no control over themselves or their state of mind. Often the subject strikes out and just snaps. Some of the signs are that the person who’s been bingeing on drugs is confused and disorientated. It’s often associated with cocaine-users.’
I sat listening to what Harry told me. So much stuff was heaped on us daily in the form of emails and electronic updates covering things like changes in stop-searches, dealing with victims of sexual abuse, who was now in charge of maintenance and servicing for police vehicles, the latest booking-in procedure for property… and that was without keeping up-to-date with the local thieves and handlers. Although, in fairness, they didn’t usually change too drastically. Half of it I never bothered to read. I didn’t think I was alone, either. If you took the time to read everything that was expected of you, you’d never get any work done.
When he’d finished explaining, I thought it through. The paramedics had been summoned to a call from one man who had been swearing and abusive, so they’d called the police to make sure they weren’t being left to face a violent junkie and his dead, overdosed mate. When they’d got there, the caller was already in cardiac arrest but his friend had been brought out of his heroin overdose by a shot of Naloxone.
‘Am I right in thinking, Harry,’ I asked, ‘that Naloxone is personal issue for opiate users who are at the highest risk of overdosing?’
‘Yep.’ He nodded, putting his hand up to his chin. He put it back down again when I glared at it. ‘It’s prescription-only. It’s mostly for those who’ve gone back to drug use after a period off the stuff and now have low tolerance.’
‘But if it is personal issue, surely there’ll be some sort of batch number on it, or identification linking it to the owner, like any other prescription?’ Something most definitely didn’t feel right about this.
‘Dunno, Nin. If you want to know more, speak to Michaela Irving. She’s the officer in the case for it.’
‘Yeah, think I will. Thanks.’ I locked the computer terminal and stood up.
‘Er, I don’t know where you think you’re going but you haven’t looked at the work you’ve been allocated all week. And I’ve had to give the house-to-house you left unfinished to someone else.’
‘OK, Harry. I get it. You’re my sergeant and, even though neither you nor I actually give a damn about doing what we’ve been told to do, as my supervisor this is you telling me that I’m behaving badly so that, if the proverbial hits the fan, you’ve given me a warning.’ I gave him a smile that I really didn’t mean and left the room to the sound of him shouting something about my staff appraisal being out of date.
I was hoping that Michaela Irving was going to shed some light on Errol Chandler’s death and help remove the nagging doubt I was feeling about the whole thing.
24
Michaela was sitting in the Divisional CID Major Crime office. The idea behind the latest set-up of crime allocation was that the detectives in her office picked up the crimes in the local area that needed more time and investigation than a single robbery or GBH but not as much as a Category A murder. The crimes within their remit fell between the two, and Errol Chandler’s supposedly accidental drug overdose was just such a crime. Even if it was thought to be non-suspicious and no one else was implicated in his death, that didn’t mean an investigation wouldn’t take place.
‘Hi, Kayla,’ I said, walking up to her across the empty office.
‘Hi, Nin. I’m sorry I haven’t come to say hello. I only got back from Northern Ireland a couple of days ago. How’s it going?’ She glanced in the direction of my stomach – I hoped because of the stabbing and not my weight gain.
‘OK, ta. It’s the usual happening: too much crime and not enough police to investigate it. You went home for a while, then?’
‘Yeah, I saw the folks. Caught up with friends. They told me that I’ve lost my accent and to stop talking like a Londoner. Said I’ve gone soft.’
‘Did you tell them that we can’t understand you half the time?’
‘Oh, aye.’ She laughed. ‘So what brings you to our office?’
I’d taken a seat beside her and was eyeing up a blue case file that was open in front of her. A mess of paperwork was strewn across the cheap wooden desk. I could recognise the Manual of Guidance forms at fifty paces, I clocked a couple of handwritten witness statements on the top.
Michaela tapped the statement on the top and blew out her cheeks. ‘That one’s from Errol Chandler’s mam,’ she said. ‘When she last saw her son alive.’
I let out a sigh. Wordlessly we both focused on the sheets of paper, contemplating the words of a tortured mother attempting to express the feelings of every parent’s living hell. Death engulfed like nothing else. To lose a child was beyond my comprehension.
But we had a job to do. We looked at each other as I said, ‘I could do with your help if you have time.’
‘Always time for you, Nin. I miss our time when we worked together. Great fun, it was.’
I wasn’t sure which particular memory was making Michaela smile as much as she currently was, but I had dozens of my own. ‘Are you talking about that call we went to for the man who hadn’t been seen for a couple of days? His neighbours were worried and called the police?’
She threw her head back and shrieked. ‘Aye, and when I looked through the letterbox he was wheeling himself down the hallway on a chair, dressing gown open and his bollocks out?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, laughing. ‘I was also thinking about the warrant we went on and you searched the bedroom but fail
ed to spot the man asleep in the bed.’
‘Well, it was five o’clock in the morning,’ she said, chuckling subsiding. ‘And we were looking for stolen car radios, not fellas fast asleep.’
‘Just as well, as we’d have come back empty-handed. Anyway,’ I continued, trying not to get off track as always with Michaela, ‘there’s something bothering me about the death of Errol Chandler, so I thought I’d ask you.’
She tilted her head to one side, shoulder-length brown hair framing her face as she raised an eyebrow and waited for me to explain.
‘Right,’ I said, looking towards the ceiling to avoid the intensity of her blue eyes, ‘Errol called the ambulance service but, by the time they arrived barely a few minutes later, he’d suffered cardiac arrest and died. The other lad, Sidney Manning, had been unconscious but was given a shot of Naloxone by the attending paramedics…’
I’d trailed off to face the bold blue eyes. I could see her shaking her head at me as I spoke. Clearly, I had said something that wasn’t true. It was my turn to raise an eyebrow at her.
Michaela held three sheets of paper up from the case file. Waving them at me, she said, ‘The paramedic who attended states quite clearly here in his statement that, when he got there, the Naloxone had already been administered to Sidney. He couldn’t risk giving him more, and the toxicology report for Sidney confirms that it was in his system before he arrived at A&E. Someone had already injected him with it before the emergency services arrived.’
Daytime television really had dulled my senses. I was struggling to understand what she was telling me. This must have been evident to Kayla but then again, we’d worked together on and off for so many years; she knew how slow I could be to catch on. She was nodding at me, coaxing the thoughts from me.
‘So… someone else injected Sidney but we don’t know who that someone was…’ More nodding from across the desk. Encouraged, I forged on with my guesswork. ‘Are we saying it was unlikely to have been Errol because of his own physical incapacity?’
‘Aye,’ said the ice-eyed detective. ‘The Naloxone syringe and wrappings were sent for fingerprinting. They came back with a negative result. There wasn’t one single fingerprint anywhere on it. If you were trying to save someone’s life by administering a drug under obvious pressure, would you take the time to wipe your fingerprints from the bottle and wear gloves?’
‘Only if I was hiding my presence at the scene of someone’s death,’ I answered.
‘Or,’ she added, ‘if you were in some way responsible for that death.’
25
My mobile phone began to ring, dragging me away from Michaela and the unease I felt about Errol’s death. I saw the word, ‘Wingsy’ on the display and gestured silent apologies to Kayla as I left her office and headed towards my own.
‘What’s up, Jug-ears?’ I asked.
‘Word of warning, Nin: Ian Hammond’s been looking for you and wants to know how you’re getting on with Joe Bring and your next prison visit.’
‘Oh, bollocks. I’d forgotten about that halfwit.’
‘When you say halfwit, are you talking about Ian Hammond or Joe Bring?’
‘Yes,’ I answered, taking the stairs towards the office. ‘I honestly planned to set up another prison visit to Joe in the next couple of days.’
‘Nin,’ said Wingsy, ‘are you walking up the stairs?’
‘Yeah. How did you know?’
‘’Cos you’re out of breath, love. You wanna lay off the Rioja.’
‘Listen, Baldy, don’t make any plans for the rest of the day. I’ve got some stuff I want to go over with you. I’ll be back in the office in two minutes.’
When I got back to Cold Case, Jim had also reappeared and was on his phone shouting at someone in Forensic Science about an exhibit. I wasn’t surprised to hear him say that it seemed to be a terrible line. Wingsy was trying hard to keep a straight face.
Rolling my eyes, I sat next to my friend and brought him up to speed with the conversation I’d had with Janice Freeman, and that I was to play no part in the investigation into Patrick’s shooting.
‘Listen to this, though, Wings,’ I said, when I had exhausted the topic of Patrick Hudson. I shifted on my chair to get into a more comfortable position. Wingsy mirrored my movements. ‘In the last few weeks in the division, there have been three fatal drug overdoses. The first was Joe Bring’s son’s mate, Daryl Hopkins, aged eighteen, the second was Errol Chandler, aged twenty-one, and the last one was discovered today. I haven’t had much of a chance to look at that one but the CAD describes the victim as a young female, approximately twenty to twenty-five years old.’
‘How exactly does this relate to Cold Case?’ asked Wingsy, crossing his arms. This wasn’t a movement I’d executed: we were clearly finished with the tandem body language. I got what he was saying without him having to put it into words – leave it alone. But it was like an itch that just had to be scratched, and I wasn’t going to be happy until Wingsy was scratching too. My determination showed on my face.
Sighing, Wingsy resigned himself to helping me. From experience he knew that, if he didn’t, I’d wear him down with my personality in the end.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’ll take a look through this lot, but you at least get on and book another visit to see Joe Bring while I get up to speed. The DI is going to do his nut if you don’t sort it out.’
I pushed the paperwork from the three drug overdoses towards him and logged back on to the computer to fill out the paperwork to see Joe. When I’d finished filling in my application, I pressed the print button. No sooner had the form whirred out of the printer than DI Hammond came into the office.
Knowing full well that the form didn’t show the time printed on it, I made out that I was looking through the paperwork on my desk for it. The DI stood for a moment or two, probably totally unconvinced by my amateur dramatics. While I searched, he asked, ‘Do you think you’re likely to get any more from Joe Bring? We’re not getting any closer to arresting Leonard Rumbly for the murder of seven people so far.’
Glancing up from the faux forage, I saw that Ian Hammond’s face was grey. I had put him in his early forties, but in the bright strip lighting of the office he looked nearer to fifty. This job did have a tendency to make people age faster than they should. Senior-ranking officers breathing down your neck for performance figures didn’t help. My premature ageing was down to alcohol, late nights and a tendency to enjoy myself. Still, I did feel a bit sorry for DI Dandy. He was still wearing those bloody shiny cufflinks, though, and his tie had some sort of waving, smiling cat on the bottom. No doubt he found it amusing. I hoped I’d never get stuck in a lift with him.
‘Dunno, boss,’ I said, getting up and going to the printer. I felt a bit mean now, pretending I didn’t know where the form was. I handed it to him for signing as I said, ‘Not sure where else to go after nearly fifty years. Shall I start going through the list of passengers? I’m interested in speaking to those who made statements and gave accounts the first time around, but even more so in those who didn’t for some reason.’
He handed the prison visit form back to me with his signature at the bottom and said, ‘When you’ve finished reviewing the entire file, show Harry a list of actions you think necessary. Bring me the ones you consider a priority and we’ll talk about what you can do. Perhaps Wingsy or Jim can help out on enquiries.’
‘Jim’s really busy,’ Wingsy jumped in. ‘I can probably help her for a day or two.’
‘That sounds like a good idea,’ said Hammond, already on his way towards the door. ‘Run that by Harry and get him to come and see me when he gets back in the office.’
‘Where is Harry? I only saw him a couple of hours ago,’ I said when Hammond had gone.
‘Some training session at Headquarters for something. Wasn’t really paying attention,’ said Wingsy. ‘Tell you what has caught my attention, though, Nina – this CAD report you printed off.’ He waved a sheet of paper at me. I’d highlighte
d the date and time of the call but that was about as far as I’d got. Wingsy, it seemed, had scrutinised it, and was about to impart some information to me.
‘Well, go on, then,’ I said. ‘What have you found?’
‘Only a vehicle that was seen by neighbours making off from the scene where Daryl Hopkins’ body was found. It was a black Polo, and a bloke in a high-visibility reflective jacket was in the passenger seat.’
‘Bloody hell, Wings. You think it’s the same vehicle that was stopped on the Noël Coward estate by the gold shop?’
‘Let’s have a look at the ANPR and find out. It seems that we may have just discovered who sold the drugs to Luke Bring’s recently departed friend.’
26
Despite knowing that those involved in burglary, theft and selling on a victim of crime’s cherished possessions were often the same people as those responsible for dealing drugs, and keeping the suppliers’ pockets lined, I still felt angry. But I had a job to do, so I got on with it.
It took some time to trawl through and find what we were looking for but, once we had the registration number of the Polo that the uniform patrol had stopped by the Noël Coward gold shop, we found out where else it had been over the last month. Despite the public’s growing concern that there were too many CCTV cameras covering the entire country, they didn’t always come up with any useful information. They also needed someone to look at the thousands of hours of footage. It was often a laborious task, picking out a grainy figure or car in the background, taking weeks or months, and I for one didn’t have the patience for it.
Eventually, Wingsy shouted at me as I kept leaning across him and pressing buttons on the keyboard while he tried to print out the Polo’s movements around the times of the three recent drug deaths. ‘Nina, will you sod off and read through that train crash file? You’re getting me down now.’
‘Alright, misery guts – just for that, I’ll stop helping you. When you’ve done, go and see Michaela. She’s the OIC. She’ll be interested in that. Oh, and make sure that you put in an intelligence report on the vehicle.’