The Third Rule (Eddie Collins Book 1)

by Andrew Barrett

  You ain’t gonna get through this without a little liquid support, Ros or no Ros.

  The SOCO building was a stand-alone single storey brick building situated on higher ground, roughly level with the cell windows at the back of Morley police station. It was, long ago, the old District Mortuary. Its windows were higher up than you might expect, they were the kind you had to stand on tiptoes to see in through, if you were that way inclined. There was an obvious large access doorway where once they’d wheeled the dead in, gurney wheels a-squeaking on the lino floor. They’d bricked up that entrance, leaving just enough room for a squeaky blue-painted door and a slim window next to it.

  Ros locked the car.

  He laughed, “I’m sweating.”

  “Don’t let it bother you.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  It was already bothering him. He’d worked from this particular office for five years, knew each of the SOCOs well, knew Jeffery, the new supervisor, well enough to know that he would be led back into work gently, probably accompanying someone until he felt able to cope alone. “Cope alone?” he whispered, as he followed Ros around to the doorway. Hell, since I’ve been away, I’ve lost my wife and my kid and should really be dead through alcohol poisoning. What made everyone think he could cope?

  He followed Ros almost cautiously over the threshold and smelled the dirty smell of crime work. He glanced around the small entrance foyer, which doubled as the Notice Board and signing-in wall, where the access to the small kitchen and toilet were. Nothing changes, he thought.

  In the main office, Mr Perfect was sitting at his desk, writing. Stuart looked up, registered who it was, and then went back to his paperwork.

  From behind him, the door to Jeffery’s office opened and a crowd of people shouting and screaming, hemmed in the new guy. People patted him on the back, and for a moment, Eddie felt a panic attack coming on. There were faces so close that he felt claustrophobic; he needed to get out of here and run away.

  They were all over him. He reached the point where he was about to scream and run. He could feel it inside, something real with edges and form, something creeping up into his chest, into his throat ready to escape like a spray of hot vomit, when it all stopped.

  “Eddie,” said a small voice from behind the crowd. They quietened, stepped aside. Jeffery smiled warmly, edged his way through, and held out a hand. “Good to have you back with us.”

  Eddie didn’t smile. Nervously, he looked around the well-worn faces of his colleagues and saw anticipation in their eyes, saw their smiles falter slightly. They expect me to howl with laughter, they expect me to be the same old Eddie, the one who tells the rudest jokes, the practical joker who crawls along the floor and reaches under someone’s desk, and grabs their leg to make them scream.

  But I don’t have a sense of humour anymore; I barely have a sense of anything anymore. I’m just a twisted, sarcastic cynic who hates all of you equally. And the only screaming today, my eager friends, will be inside my head. Go away; I will not perform the magic for you anymore.

  He reached out and shook. “It’s good to be back,” he lied. He smiled and the banter sprang up again. The patting began again, and Jeffery urged him to turn around and look up the office to where his desk – surely covered in spider’s webs and moss by now – was decorated in home-made bunting, where balloons, tied in threes, with Happy 40th Birthday printed on them, hung from the light fixture over his chair.

  Eddie breathed deeply, and tried to give them what they wanted. He smiled and said, “Aw, you guys… hey, what can I say?” There was dampness in his eyes, and it made them ‘aw’ and ‘coo’. He had given something, and it was just enough, thankfully.

  Please don’t ask for a fucking speech, because I will walk out. I will.

  “We couldn’t get any Welcome Back balloons,” Terri said. She squeezed his arm and gave him a peck on the cheek, and then she walked by him, her long black hair swishing this way and that, just as it always had. But it was good of her to be so friendly. Andy and Helen, it seemed, knew he was verging on embarrassment, merely slapped his arm and shook his hand respectively, and said almost in unison, “Good to have you back, mate,” as they walked to their own desks.

  Ros disappeared back around the corner, “I’ll put the kettle on,” she said, “make us all a brew.” Eddie stared after her, wishing she’d come back.

  Stuart glanced his way, through expressionless eyes, and even though he smiled at Eddie, it was false, a lie etched onto a face as cold as the nether regions of a freezer. They knew. They all knew about Sammy, and they all knew about Jilly kicking him out, and they all knew he was floating on a swamp filled with brandy. They knew it all. Stuart’s eyes said they did, but no one said a word about it; only, how are you, good to have you back, blah, blah, blah. And provided it didn’t interfere with his work he would be accepted back into the fold.

  “Get yourself fixed up with a coffee, Eddie,” said Jeffery, “and then we’ll have a natter. Okay?”

  * * *

  The door closed behind them, and suddenly there was silence. Eddie felt trapped and alone. Jeffery hung up his expensive jacket and then sat behind his desk. He was small, had a Roman nose and close dark eyes; not unfriendly but probing. He too wore the perpetual smile of a man tainted by too many bodies, and too many polite meetings with people he hated. “So, how’s it going?”

  He shrugged, “Okay.”

  “Any trouble from the leg?”

  Eddie flinched as his mind made Jeffery’s mouth say, ‘So, how’s it going, Eddie; Sammy still dead then? Oh, good, that’s good. Wife still screwed up in the head over it too? Yeah, great. What? You’re a fully-fledged alcoholic now? That is good news; do you need special training or can anyone try.’ He caught himself, pulled his wandering mind back into Jeffery’s office and tried to focus on the man. “It aches sometimes. Especially when it’s cold; I think it thinks it’s arthritis.” He smiled, trying to be polite, since Jeffery had been so courteous.

  “That’s the pleasantries out the way, let’s get down to the truth.”

  Eddie recoiled because whatever was wrong in his shitty life, there was one important thing he definitely wasn’t ready for, and that was the damned truth.

  “I know what’s happened to you recently.” Jeffery leaned forward on his desk, hands together as though in some kind of prayer. “But I won’t pretend to know how things are up here,” he pointed to his head, “because even if you explained it to me, I still wouldn’t get it. I can’t imagine what you’ve had to go through and what you’ve had to do to get through each day. Though, since you’ve made it back here, I have to put down on record that I admire your strength.”

  “I have no strength. Just stumbling from one crisis to another.”

  “I’ll do all I can to ease you back into the routine. If there’s anything troubling you, anything that makes you feel uncomfortable, or you just want to call time-out, tell me, okay? I’ll help you if I can.”

  “Thanks,” Eddie felt humble, and he also felt a little emotional. He hoped Jeffery would leave all that horrible stuff alone now before his lip starting quivering and he fell off the chair in a lump of grief onto the carpet.

  “How do you think you’ll cope with normal volume crime, burglaries, car crime, that sort of thing?”

  Eddie shrugged. “Truthfully?”

  Jeffery nodded.

  “I have no idea. If it wasn’t for Ros, then I probably would have found it easier to stay in my flat than come back here.”

  Jeffery thought for a moment, a stray finger hovering over his lips. “The welcome wasn’t my idea; I thought you’d like to just slip behind your desk and spend the first day or two catching up with developments. But everyone was determined to officially break the ice and welcome you back.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you think it was a good thing, the welcoming committee?”

  “It was kind of everyone. I would have liked to slip back in, but I guess
this way we get all the intros over quickly.” Eddie noticed how his fingers trembled slightly. Was that drink induced or was it the nerves of starting all over again like a man on his first day in a strange job? “I just… I don’t want any sympathy though, you know.” And then it all simply fell out of his mouth. “I don’t want people crowding me. You know when you visit someone in hospital, and you’re one of three or four people looking down at the guy in bed, and you’re all asking how it’s going and do you want any grapes bringing in, and have you got a newspaper, do you need change for the payphone? I feel like the guy in bed, looking up at all these faces, who are looking down at me asking inane questions, when you know all they really want is the gory stuff, the real stuff – not because they’re all creeps, but because they want to walk in your shoes, see what it would be like, see if they could handle it. Who knows?” His eyes narrowed and his cheeks rose slightly, “I’m not making any sense, am I?”

  Jeffery nodded. “Perfect sense.”

  “I don’t want the sympathy. I just want to be left alone to get on with things. I’m sorry if it sounds ungrateful, and I understand that they all want answers. But I don’t want to give them. I’ve lived it, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Do you want me to tell that to them? Or are you going to do it every time one of them asks awkward questions?”

  “I think I should do it, don’t you?”

  “Your call. But if that’s what you want, you or I should do it today.”

  Eddie nodded, fingers tingling now.

  “What about the other things, the more serious jobs, how do you feel about them?”

  “You’re asking me things that I don’t know. I’m still at the point where I have good days and bad days; I have no…” he stared around, searching for the word, “I have no consistency yet.”

  Jeffery reclined, folded his arms. “This is what we’ll do. You spend a week or two with Ros. Shadow her, see how you feel. If a biggy comes in and you’re not up to it, then I’ll pull you off, no problem; I’ll send someone else. That sound okay?”

  “Sounds fair to me.”

  “How about road accidents?”

  How about them indeed.

  Traffic officers only called SOCO to a road accident when there was a fatality, or likely to be a fatality. They were invariably not pretty sights; clumps of crumpled metal that used to be shiny cars, wheels pointing in the wrong direction, doors that didn’t open any more, rooflines that looked like tents because the concrete streetlamp won the impact competition; skid marks, splashes of blood on the airbag, windscreen glass with tufts of hair blowing in the breeze. Footballs deflated, trapped beneath screaming tyres. And the tears. And the paramedics and the fire brigade with their cutting equipment. Baseball caps with no one’s head in them.

  Death. Death. Orphans, parentless kids, widows and widowers.

  He squinted at Jeffery, and all these thoughts rattled around his head; and the need for a drink accompanied them and turned the trembling into a shake; nothing noticeable, at least not yet, just a tremor in the hands, but a need that was growing stronger by the minute. “I’ll leave off the road accidents for a while, if that’s okay.”

  “Fine. But after a month, I want us to meet again. I want us to talk honestly about how you think you’re doing versus how I think you’re doing, and take it from there. I’ll not rush you into anything, Eddie; but eventually I want you back fully operational.”

  Eddie nodded. That was okay; he was right to expect that and for the moment he couldn’t see a problem with it. The real big problem was still some days away. And that problem would be out of Jeffery’s reach, well out of his league.

  — Three —

  The office was still a dark and dingy place. It always felt cramped too; too many bodies and not enough desk space. But it was always warm, and on days like today, it was too warm; the place was crammed with computers and even though the windows were open, the heat was stifling, adding to the claustrophobic feeling. The walls were police issue magnolia, the shiny, well-worn carpet tiles, and the white paintwork was decidedly yellow interspersed with black hand marks as though some kid had run amuck after a finger-painting spree. All the desks bore the battle scars of twenty-odd years’ life working for the police.

  Over in the far corner, screwed to the wall, was a white sheet of chipboard with registration numbers printed on it and van keys dangling from hooks directly beneath them. And below each one was a charger for the phone, radio, sat nav, and Maglite, and a laptop docking station with a scribbled note on a dayglo sticker that said ‘Upload at 0100hrs’. In shelves below these were little storage pens for the digital cameras and flash units, and their respective chargers.

  The chairs were creaky things, and now, sitting in them patiently, after Jeffery made his brief announcement, were Eddie’s beloved work colleagues; people who sat with their arms folded, or leaned against the desk, propping up their faces with a fist.

  But one thing they all had in common was anticipation. They wanted a show; they wanted a piece of someone’s life that they could only imagine. And why? Because it made their own lives seem a little more normal, a little less fragmented by comparison. They could laugh after he’d gone out, they could all gather in a circle and be grateful that this shit didn’t fall on their shoulders. Each and every one of them waited for the story that made their own lives appear tolerable. They stared, waiting.

  “I’ve been off work since January,” and even he noticed the quiver in his voice, “and I guess you’ve all had extra work to get through.”

  “We never noticed!” Duffy shouted out. It brought a welcome ripple of laughter.

  He patted the leg. “It’s getting better; I still take painkillers and some days it still hurts like a bitch, but most of the time, I hardly notice it’s there.”

  “Get some whisky in yer, lad, that’ll sort it.”

  Eddie looked at Ros.

  Stuart interrupted. “Are you on light duties?”

  “No.”

  “Will you complete a risk assessment for each job?” On the surface, it was a fair question, but one laced with insinuation: if you can’t do the job, why are you here, hampering us?

  “Eddie will carry out a visual risk assessment at each job, Stuart,” said Jeffery, “as all of you do as a matter of course. And he is on recuperative duties, not light duties.”

  “And will you be double-crewing?” Stuart’s face was still blank, but behind it was trouble, as though he begrudged Eddie being here at all. Traditionally they’d got along together like two dogs fighting over a bitch on heat, and it seemed that, even after all he’d been through he wanted to continue where they’d left off.

  “Let him get on with it, Stuart, please.”

  “I’ll be crewing with Ros. Just to get me back into the swing of things. If you don’t mind, that is, Stuart.” He stared at Stuart, and the same old familiar hatred surfaced. He looked at him, at his ski-ramp nose, turned up to expose deep black circular nostrils; at his round, wide-apart deep blue eyes; and at his receding hairline and slicked back black hair over large cabbage ears. No Mr Universe was Stuart. And the way he spoke grated like someone scraping their nails down a blackboard; when he opened his mouth to speak, the voice came out of his nose, and sometimes it was hard not to laugh and other times it was hard not to punch him.

  Stuart shrugged. “No skin off my nose,” he picked up his pen and turned away.

  Eddie noticed how Toni, Duffy, and the others, shook their heads at Stuart. “I see you’re still a wanker, Stuart.”

  “Keep to the point, Eddie,” said Jeffery.

  Eddie went on to tell them, in the briefest way, about Sammy and the way he died; and gave the briefest overview of how that more or less ended his family life, and how he felt about that. He asked if anyone here had done the scene, and everyone shook their heads.

  “Out of Division,” said Jeffery.

  “The car? Has it been found?”

  “Don’t think so
.”

  And then, just for the record, to save the gossip-mongers a job, he told how Jilly and he had split up; not how Jilly kicked him out because of the drinking, which got out of hand somewhere near the end of February; just that they had split up. He noticed Stuart look up then, and how he stared between himself and Ros, a sliver of a smile on his face, before going back to his writing. And Eddie rounded off the talk by saying, “And now I’m back, battered and bruised, but otherwise my old self—”

  “Oh good,” Stuart said without looking up.

  Eddie ignored him. “Although I’ll be a bit slow on the jovial front,” he looked towards Duffy who sat there respectfully engrossed, “but hopefully…” he stumbled for words, voice growing ever more quiet.

  “You’ll do it, kid,” Duffy said.

  “Yeah, give it some time.”

  “Why are you telling us all this?” Stuart looked around at the others and assumed incorrectly that they felt as he did.

  “So you won’t have to whisper behind my back, and so that pricks like you,” he looked at Stuart, “don’t start any rumours. Plus,” his roaming eyes ignored Stuart, “I think you deserve an explanation without being embarrassed to come and ask for it. You can tell anyone what I’ve told you today. But if you have any questions, ask me. Don’t be afraid of hurting me. I promise that none of you can hurt me any more than I already hurt myself.”

  The unexpected then happened, and it caused Eddie to nod gracefully and remove himself from the office for a cigarette, closely followed by another. Duffy began it, but soon they all applauded; one or two even whistled and cheered. Eddie went red, and Stuart remained silent.

  Monday 22nd June

  Chapter Nineteen

  — One —

  Mick sucked another Polo, his fourth already this morning on his journey into the sticks. Rochester had given him a fair story to get him back on track. It had everything he needed to show how cruel and desperate the world had become, and it had everything he needed to secure his job, if he handled it right. On his way here, hoping to Christ the police didn’t pull him over – he’d had a bit to drink again last night over at Eddie’s, and becoming a disqualified driver would do nothing to enhance his career prospects – he had thought about how desperate the old guy must really be to have written a letter like that. He was looking forward to meeting him, this Lincoln Farrier.