by Lisa Cutts
The irony of Milton’s leg injury hadn’t failed to pass Harry by as he got out of his car and went past Linda’s Mazda on the driveway to the front door. He rang the bell and waited.
Through habit, he ran an eye over the house. It might not have been enemy territory but he’d learned that it was best to be cautious. The curtains were pulled back, the upstairs bedroom window was open and the side gate was ajar. Something about the stillness of the house got to Harry. Quiet was usually a good thing, only not today. He felt a lurch in his stomach that told him things weren’t right.
With his eyes still on the house, he backed down the drive, opened the car door and felt around in the glove compartment until his fingers grasped his Airwave radio and then his asp.
Because he was right-handed, the metal baton felt more natural in his right palm, although he chose not to extend the weapon; he had a feeling that the element of surprise was his best option. Radio silenced in the other hand, he made his way back along the driveway to the open gate.
It crossed Harry’s mind that he might have assessed the situation incorrectly and Linda might be inside putting the kettle on, wondering what to do first that morning, with her husband on his way to work and their son away at university.
As he stood still, deciding whether to continue around the back of the house or whether to knock on the door, the sound of the landline ringing from the front room broke the silence. No one came to answer it, and the shrill noise eventually stopped when the answerphone cut in.
Harry instinctively broke into a run, hurtling through the gate, along the side of the house, past the kitchen door to the rear of the property. His breath caught and all he could hear was his heart hammering as he came to a stop and peered through the double glass doors to see Linda’s body lying on the tiles, thick blood seeping from her skull.
Even though he took it all in with one glance, it was the first sight of her face with one eye closed and the other staring straight at him that would haunt his days.
Harry stared at the bloody face of Linda Bowman through the glass. He only took a second to surge into action, although it felt as though he’d stood still for minutes. He had seen bodies too numerous to recall. Some deaths were due to stabbings, some to gun shots, occasionally there’d be a drowning, once there’d been a man crushed beyond recognition by a metal skip dropped on him in an industrial accident, but not one of them hijacked his thoughts or filled his nightmares. It wasn’t because he didn’t care about people or his job, only that was what it was – a job. People killed each other and died horrifically every day, and frequently the bodies came his way. The difference was this body belonged to someone he knew. Harry liked Linda, he had eaten meals with Linda, he had danced with her at social functions. Harry had even admired Linda from afar, wondering why she stayed with a man like Milton. Harry had always thought that Linda was the sort of person who could have achieved anything in the right circumstances if she set her mind to it.
Now he found himself running towards her on the kitchen floor, having flung open the unlocked back door. His mind was racing. He was a professional and not a total fool. The intruder could still be on the premises. Getting himself killed wouldn’t help anyone, and certainly not Linda.
He focused. He breathed. He stared at the Airwave radio in his hand and realized that at some point between reaching the back door and kneeling beside her he must have turned it on. He pressed the emergency button, overriding all other transmissions, and called for assistance.
Harry knew that as soon as he summoned help it would be on its way. His priority was Linda, but he fought the urge to sit beside her, try to stop the bleeding from her head, straighten her clothing, tilt her mouth back to breathe air into her lungs. Harry put his hand out to touch her face, and jerked it back as soon as he felt fluid beneath a swelling to her right temple. He had been to enough post-mortems and read enough pathologists’ reports to recognize the signs of a large bleed beneath the skin. Although he was no medical expert, Harry’s police experience over the years told him he was looking at a skull fracture.
Anger and rage gripped him as be fought the urge to charge from room to room, find whoever had done this and punch the living daylights out of them. He stopped himself for one reason only: he was good at his job and that meant someone, somewhere was going to face up to what they’d done to Linda. If he didn’t rein in his feelings, he could be the one who jeopardized that.
He had to find whoever had done it.
Harry could see no signs of breathing from Linda and the black matted hair, caked in drying blood, pushed him towards the decision to leave her where she was and make sure that no one else was in the property. He felt for a pulse, even though he knew from looking at her that he was wasting his time. He couldn’t ignore the risk of the offender hiding somewhere, but equally, he knew the torment he would suffer if there was someone else lying injured that he could have saved. One death in the house was bad enough: he wouldn’t be responsible for leaving someone to draw their last breath whilst he lamented over Linda.
He cast his eyes over her face and had to stop himself from stroking her cheek. It would have been a kind parting gesture from one friend to another, but ever the professional, he couldn’t risk contaminating the scene any further. Heartbreaking as it was, that was what she was now: a corpse and a crime scene. The woman who had offered him sound marriage advice a number of times when he’d asked her for help, the woman who had driven over to his house in the middle of the night when one of his children was sick and his wife was praying at her own mother’s hospital bedside, the woman who had confided in him that her husband was having an affair and she didn’t know what to do.
Harry had let Linda down, although he knew that the person who had really let her down was Milton.
Milton. If he was responsible for this, Harry could stay here right next to her. But if he was wrong about Milton, he had to move and do it fast. Any second now, sirens would shatter the suburban streets, alerting the killer that Linda’s body had been discovered. That was, of course, if they hadn’t seen his car pull up outside, heard him knock on the door and watched him sprint through the gate and down the side of the house.
I’m no good dead, thought Harry as he tore his gaze away. He ran his eyes over the knife block. It was full. He took this as a sign that today wouldn’t be the day the stab-proof vest hanging in his office three miles away might have saved his life if he’d paused to put it on.
His heart was beating faster now, the adrenalin kicking in. In the hall Harry hesitated, briefly wondering whether he should go upstairs, or into the utility room and garage at the back of the house, or into the living room. He listened for sounds from anywhere else in the house.
All was still. Nothing stirred.
Mind made up, he was going to start with the utility room with its access to the back of the house. He took a step across the hall’s thick carpet. The sounds of his movement were covered as his foot sank into the depths of grey wool. The sound he did hear, however, was the brushing of the front door as it was pushed open from outside, rubbing against the pile.
Harry spun on the spot, asp in hand, arm pulled back, about to extend the metal baton in his fist straight into the face of a uniform PC.
‘Sorry, sir,’ said the young lad, instinctively moving his head out of the direct line of his superior. ‘We were told to make it a silent approach and the door was on the latch.’
Not wanting to waste time, Harry said, ‘Get in the kitchen. Don’t move her, just stand guard until we’ve checked the rest of the house. And tell one of the two officers who have just pulled up outside to stand by the front door, and the other to search the utility room that leads to the garage.’ As he said ‘utility room’, Harry pointed at the back of the hallway.
The PC neither asked how he knew it was the utility room nor showed any signs that he found it interesting that the DI knew what lay beyond the door. He did as he was told and trained to do, and went to stand next to a
woman who had been dead for some time.
Chapter 3
DC Hazel Hamilton had one ear tuned to the car’s police radio as she took notes of Luke’s version of the accident.
‘I heard the car before I saw it,’ said Luke. ‘I started to run before I thought about it.’
She looked round at him, his face visible between the headrests, neutral and curious about everything going on around him.
Despite his reassurances that he was fine, she knew all too well that sometimes people didn’t like to admit that they were feeling sick because of what they’d seen. She couldn’t completely rule out delayed shock or that for all his bravado he was suffering.
She waited with her biro poised above the page in her pocket notebook for Luke to continue.
‘I couldn’t be completely accurate, but I suppose he was doing about forty miles an hour,’ said Luke after a ten- or fifteen-second pause.
Even though Hazel now had her head down and was writing, she could see the man on the back seat of the car crane his neck towards the accident. It was natural for people to be curious, although rubberneckers always made her feel uneasy.
At that moment, her train of thought was interrupted by a voice on the radio summoning all free and available patrols to make their way to an address, possible intruder on premises, woman lying injured. She had a feeling that she was listening to the sounds of Major Crime being summoned to their next investigation.
The sound of her phone ringing from her pocket told her her instinct was right and she was about to get a whole lot busier.
To give herself some space and avoid being overheard, she climbed out of the car into the early morning heat and took a call from her former uniform inspector, Josh Walker. He was someone who had been a constant support to her before she’d returned to Major Crime. She listened intently, hardly uttered one word.
She ended the call and tapping the mobile phone into her empty hand glanced over her shoulder to the marked car, windows and doors shut, witness waiting for her return. She took in Luke as he sat impassive, watching her through the glass. He couldn’t possibly know that she had just been instructed to find someone else to take his statement, then go and change her clothes to avoid cross-contamination from the scene, before heading off to DI Bowman’s house.
Inspector Walker’s last words to her had been, ‘Someone’s attacked his wife in their home. We think Milton did it.’
Chapter 4
By the time Hazel had showered, changed and arrived at the Bowman home, several marked and unmarked police cars, two grey CSI vans, an ambulance and a paramedic car were outside, and metres of police tape were strung across the road, marking out a sizeable area around the house. Two police community support officers stood on the cordon, one gripping the blue-and-white scene log, making a note of everyone going in and out, along with times and roles. No one got in or out without signing and giving a reason and everyone entering wore a white scene suit with hood, white overshoes and a white face mask.
At some distance from the cordon, the media were already in the street, trying their luck with anyone who would talk to them.
One reporter saw Hazel and said hello. He looked familiar from the local news but Hazel knew better than to talk to him. He had a job to do, as did she. The difference was that hers related to identifying, arresting and convicting a killer. His involved a three-minute news story that would be forgotten when the county’s next unexplained death came along.
‘Hello, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard there have been some exciting developments.’
She had to hand it to him – it was a great line chancing that she would at least confirm something new had happened, even if she went no further.
The young, charming reporter had overstepped the line by calling her ‘Sergeant’, something that she wasn’t, and he was probably aware of.
He didn’t even look crestfallen when she replied, ‘Oh really. What’s that then?’
‘Just heard something was happening.’
The cameraman looked up into the trees lining both sides of the avenue and shifted his camera from one shoulder to the other.
‘Let me know when you find out,’ said Hazel, already walking away to the mobile incident room set up outside the cordon where the inspector was waiting. She didn’t give the reporter another thought.
She didn’t need a two-day media training course to know when a journalist was full of crap.
At the door of the mobile incident room, which was technically speaking a van, Hazel met with Josh Walker. He winked at her as he came out with tea in a polystyrene cup.
‘World and his wife are here, Haze,’ he said to her when he had led her safely out of earshot. ‘Thanks for getting here so fast after I called you. This is a right cluster fuck. Looks like Milton did his wife in, and then drove into a wall or flowerbed or whatever the fuck it was.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s unbelievable. Why would he do it?’
‘Perhaps he didn’t do it on purpose,’ she replied, pulling out her shirt to allow some air to circulate. She was already feeling clammy, despite the change of shirt and suit. ‘He didn’t seem the type to take his own life.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I don’t know.’ She paused, studying the face of her old inspector, a man she’d asked advice of so many times and who had steered her in the right direction, been a constant in her career and made her smile when things hadn’t gone according to plan.
‘Perhaps it all got too much. We all have our dark days, Josh.’
Before he had a chance to answer her, another figure appeared in the doorway of the incident room. This time it was Harry Powell. He looked weary yet alert.
Hazel had worked with him in the Major Crime Department for some months now, and like most of the officers and staff in their division, Harry was easy to deal with. Sometimes he swore and shouted, but he knew how to get a job done properly.
Harry’s phone rang, and Hazel took the momentary distraction as her chance to discuss him with Josh.
‘You think he’s OK?’ she asked, nodding her head at the DI’s back as he ducked back into the van. ‘Did he find Milton’s wife?’
‘Yeah. Poor bastard’s been friends with them for years. Not sure how much they all saw of each other lately. There’s not much socializing going on these days. You know what it’s like: when you’ve finished for the day, there’s a tendency to get home as fast as possible. Harry told me he worked over two hundred and fifty hours last month and got called out on seven different occasions in the middle of the night.’
Hazel raised an eyebrow at her mentor. ‘That’s a lot of overtime. Who’d be an inspector? You don’t even get paid for the extra hours.’
‘Yeah, true, but I get to go to meetings with the superintendent and get shouted at for being a useless twat. It’s what I live for. Anyway, the reason I wanted you here was because you’re a trained family liaison officer and we may need you. I know that FLOs don’t usually get deployed to the scene, it’s just that I wanted to speak to you about it first before I put your name forward.’
‘Really,’ said Hazel, running through in her mind whether she could take on a family liaison officer role on top of personal commitments. The work meant extra hours and sometimes taking phone calls in the early hours of the morning, being available whenever the family needed you, certainly in the first few days at least, despite establishing times to ring.
‘I’m only giving you the heads up for now,’ said Josh. ‘Milton’s not looking too good as you know, and from Harry’s description, the wife is definitely dead, although the paramedics are still inside. They have a son, so someone within the incident room’s needed to speak to their boy. A lot of the trained officers in Major Crime and from East Rise know the family. If I’m brutally honest, we’re running out of options. We asked for help from another county although, quite frankly, that’s not the preferred route. And I know that you’d be the best person for this one.’
‘I se
e what you’re saying,’ said Hazel, ‘let’s keep this in-house. We don’t want everyone knowing that the chances are one of our DIs killed his wife and then tried to commit suicide.’
‘That’s about it,’ agreed Josh, casting an eye in the direction of the gathering news crews. ‘But it’s going to cause a total media storm when it does get out and I don’t fancy the fallout.’
Chapter 5
‘You’ll need to take my clothes,’ said Harry to Detective Chief Inspector Barbara Venice who was in overall charge of the murder investigation.
She mulled over what he’d said. Normally, she’d get a PC or DC to talk to witnesses about seizing their clothing except this wasn’t an ordinary day, and it certainly wasn’t an ordinary investigation. The procedures were the same no matter who the victims of such a crime were, and police officers and their families wouldn’t receive preferential treatment. However, if things weren’t done correctly, there would be a review and all manner of criticism thrown at her and her team for failing to investigate. And all because the only suspect they had so far was one of their own.
‘I don’t need to tell you how careful we’re going to have to be, Harry. I’ve already requested an out-of-county deputy SIO to lessen the chance of being accused of hiding anything.’
Barbara Venice paused to glance down at her policy file open in front of her.
‘Tell you what, get yourself away from here. Give me your car keys and we’ll take it back to the nick. In the meantime, I’ll find a patrol to run you home, but it’ll be best if you sit on a paper sheet in the back of the car. I don’t want any contact traces dropping off you before we get your clothes off.’
In spite of how the morning had gone, Harry smirked at her.
‘Pack it in, you silly great sod,’ she said. ‘I’m being extra cautious with this one.’
Barbara Venice was the same age as Harry although she looked years younger, and unlike Harry, hadn’t had one of her front teeth knocked out playing rugby. The false tooth hid it well, but the drinking and socializing weren’t so easily magicked away with a trip to the dentist for an implant.