Over the Edge

by Stuart Pawson

  ‘Which one is it this time?’ Mrs Dobson asked when we were seated in her tiny front room.

  She was younger than I expected, with a face that had once been handsome but now bore the lines of constant disappointment. Her streaked hair was tied back in a ponytail and when she’d turned to let me in I’d seen a butterfly tattooed on her shoulder.

  ‘Which one?’ I queried.

  ‘Dale or his dad?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s Dale.’

  ‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘There was a car crash up on the top road, early Thursday morning. I’m sorry to have to tell you, Mrs Dobson, that Dale is dead. We’ve only just identified him as the driver.’

  She flinched at the word dead, but didn’t look too surprised or upset. This wasn’t the first time a detective had knocked at the door and asked if he could have a word. It was just another episode in the tragic story that began when Dale was born. She sniffed and forced her mouth into a grim smile but the corners were twitching as she stared beyond me, to a distant time and place where the memories were happier.

  ‘It was a high-speed crash,’ I went on. ‘He was killed instantly.’

  ‘Was anyone with him?’ she asked.

  ‘Not that we’ve been able to establish.’

  ‘Well that’s a blessing. Unlike Dale, though. He liked to make as much misery as possible out of everything he did.’

  ‘We haven’t been able to find an address for him. Do you know where he lived?’

  ‘No. I asked him, but he said he moved around. And…’ She stopped before completing the sentence.

  ‘And…’ I prompted.

  She shrugged her shoulders and blew her nose on a tissue. ‘And he said it was best if I didn’t know, whatever that means.’ She rose to her feet, saying: ‘Will you excuse me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She left the room and returned a couple of minutes later. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  I said: ‘It’s been a shock for you. When did you last see Dale?’

  ‘Last time I saw him? That would be about a month ago. He never came to visit me, but sometimes he’d just turn up and demand a bed for a night or two. It was as if…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘As if…he was lying low for a bit, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Lying low from what?’

  ‘I don’t know. He never had a proper job but always had plenty of money. He was a bad ‘un, Inspector. I know that. These days, you imagine it’s drugs, don’t you? He was mixed up in something, that’s for sure.’

  The kettle in the kitchen switched off with a loud click and Mrs Dobson went to make some tea. I had a look around the room and was surprised by the stuff she had. A big copper samovar stood in one corner, glowing like a sunset, and a tall jardinière filled with dried flowers was in another. The coffee table was jade and the sideboard was obviously antique. The photos on the wall were sepia prints of old Huddersfield.

  ‘I’ve been admiring your stuff,’ I told her when she returned. ‘Is that what they call a samovar?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It’s a beauty’

  She placed my tea on the jade table. ‘I like nice things,’ she said, ‘but most of them are fake, like this table.’

  When she was seated again I said: ‘It sounds as if Dale has always been a problem, Mrs Dobson.’

  She sipped her tea, then said: ‘I lost him when he was eleven. Up to then he’d been a delightful little boy, but, overnight, something happened. He became a racist. You know what it’s like around here, but you have to give and take. I’ve got Asians on either side, for about three houses, but we get along well. The children are polite and they’ll run errands for you. But with Dale it was Paki this and nigger that. He didn’t care who heard him. Then he got mixed up with the football crowd.’

  ‘What about his dad?’ I asked, remembering her question when she’d asked me in: ‘Which one is it?’

  ‘Him! Uh,’ she snorted. ‘Another waste of oxygen. I’m afraid he was probably Dale’s role model, even though we split up when Dale was six. He’s done time, too.’

  ‘What for?’ I asked.

  ‘GBH. He beat…somebody…up. And receiving, I think.’

  ‘Do you keep in touch?’

  ‘He sends me a Christmas card, would you believe? He called here, about five years ago, but I wouldn’t let him in. I told him where to go.’

  ‘Was it you he beat up?’

  She looked down at her knees again and whispered: ‘Yes.’

  ‘When did Dale leave home?’

  ‘Dale? It wasn’t a sudden thing. He started staying out when he was about fourteen or fifteen. At first I assumed he was with a girl – he was a good-looking boy, never had any trouble attracting them. Gradually it built up until he was out more than he was in. By the time he was seventeen I hardly ever saw him.’

  ‘But you’ve no idea if he was working for anybody, or what he was doing?’

  ‘Driving, at a guess. He was mad keen on cars and driving.’

  ‘Right. Dale’s fingerprints and DNA were already on our files, and we’ve matched them to the person in the car. However, it’s normal for us to ask a family member to formally identify the body. Do you think you’ll be up to it?’

  Her face clouded with alarm. ‘I thought you said it was him.’

  ‘It is. There’s no doubt about it. It’s not essential but we’d still like you to confirm it. And sometimes…you know…it helps if you can see the body.’

  ‘But you’re certain it’s him?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘OK. When? When do you want me to do it?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, or will you be working?’

  ‘My son is dead. I think that’s worth a day off work, don’t you, Inspector? And maybe I’ll have another for the funeral. Then I can say good riddance to him once and for all.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  After Monday’s morning prayers in the superintendents office we held our normal meeting in the CID office. It’s when we compare notes to bring each other up to speed, and I hand out any new cases.

  ‘OK,’ I began. ‘Mr Wood wants a result on the burglaries, so where are we at?’

  ‘Which burglaries?’ somebody asked.

  ‘Any of them.’

  ‘Well,’ Jeff Caton began, ‘as you know, Charlie, we appear to have two different MOs, therefore possibly two teams at work. One is concentrating on properties at the lower end of the scale, mainly in the Sylvan Fields estate, and the others are more mobile and breaking in to more expensive properties.’

  I let him rabbit on about the burglaries. Jeff never uses one word if seven will do. Some stolen items had been recovered from Honest John’s secondhand shop, but the seller had given a false address and Honest John’s description was vague.

  ‘He’s a lying toad,’ Dave Sparkington informed us all.

  Fingerprints had been found at one house, and blood from the glass of a broken window at another, but they weren’t on the database. It was all bread-and butter stuff, like we have all the time. We’d eventually catch someone and put them in court, but they’d be a first-time offender and walk away with probation or community service.

  ‘As you will have noticed,’ I said when we’d finished with the burglaries, ‘our night ’tec has graciously stayed behind to speak to the meeting. That’s him in the corner, blinking like an owl, for those of you who’ve forgotten what he looks like. Over to you, Rodger.’

  Rodger came to Britain from Jamaica as a small boy, but he’s no token black man. He’s my secret weapon. Heckley is a small town, and most of us are probably known to all the villains, but not Rodger. Nobody expects a detective to be black, even if he is six-and-a-half feet tall and dresses like the Duke of Westminster. He and his wife have volunteered to work regular nights, rather than be on differing shift rotas, so they can see more of each other. And, as he sometimes says in a mock West Indies accent: when he puts on his shades and cl
oses his mouth, nobody can see him.

  ‘There was an RTA on the top road in the early hours of last Thursday,’ he told us, and went on to describe the accident. He read from the milkman’s statement about seeing two sports cars apparently racing a month earlier. ‘This is where it gets interesting,’ he said. ‘Five weeks ago, on September twentieth, thieves stole an MG TF from a house in Tintwistle. Four days later a similar car was hijacked from a young woman in a multi-storey car park in Manchester. Neither car has been seen again, unless they are what the milkman saw.’

  ‘Hairdressers’ cars,’ someone informed us disdainfully.

  ‘The 1.8VV’s a flyer,’ one of the younger members protested.

  ‘If you call nought to 60 in 7.7 flying.’

  ‘Whoa!’ I interrupted. ‘We’re not discussing the merits of MGs. Carry on, Rodge.’

  ‘OK. Now we come up-to-date. Two weeks ago, October 7, a blue Volkswagen GTi was stolen from a house in Leeds. Like the first MG, the house was broken into and the keys taken. Three evenings later a similar car, but coloured black, was hijacked from a 25-year-old man outside Marsden station. The blue car was the one involved in the RTA, Thursday morning. Saturday morning the black one was found burnt-out on the edge of Heckley park.’

  ‘They’re stealing them to order,’ someone suggested.

  ‘In pairs – his and hers,’ another added.

  ‘The MGs were probably re-plated and passed on, so why did they torch the Golf?’

  ‘Because of the accident? Maybe they thought it was too hot.’

  ‘Was he running away from anything?’

  ‘Nothing we know about,’ I replied. ‘It’d been a quiet night.’

  It was all conjecture. I told them about Dale, the money and the gun, and asked Maggie Maddison to do the honours at the mortuary with the grieving mother. ‘I don t think you’ll need the box of tissues,’ I told her when she gave me that why me? look. ‘She actually used the words “good riddance”.’

  ‘Rodge wants to stay on this,’ I said, ‘so we need a new night ’tec. Can I have a volunteer, please?’

  The first person whose eyes I caught nodded and said: ‘I could do with a rest.’

  ‘Thanks. Maggie and John, could you work with Rodge? I’d concentrate on Dobson’s background, associates, etcetera. You know the score. Then maybe try to trace his route while things are fresh in people’s minds. People may have heard the car, or cars, go by.’

  The route was easier to trace than expected. There are early risers, there are insomniacs and there are people who drag themselves reluctandy out of their pit, morning after morning, year after year, to travel to some tedious job that they hate. For all of them, a car careering by at over a hundred miles per hour was a break with routine and therefore memorable. Rodger, Maggie and John worked backwards from the scene of the accident. At each junction they would take a road each and knock on doors. One of them would soon strike gold, and off they would go to the next junction. Slowly, they found themselves working their way over the tops into the outskirts of Greater Manchester. On Tuesday an appeal was made on local radio and more sightings and hearings came in. Dozens of them. By Wednesday we had the route of Dobson’s last journey, with a few gaps, marked on a map on the office wall.

  There’d been two cars, and they’d gone round in a big circle, starting and finishing at Heckley, except that Dobson didn’t quite make it all the way. They’d driven south, skirting Huddersfield and Holmfirth, then headed over Saddleworth Moor into Lancashire. We lost them in one or two places but the return journey brought them back over the tops on the Oldfield Road. Maggie took me round and it measured 45 miles.

  On the way we stopped at the crash scene to look at the flowers: spray after spray in their cellophane wrappings, stretching along the verge for fifteen yards. I don’t know if it was hay fever or the sandwich I’d had in the canteen, but I felt unwell. It must have been hay fever, psychosomatic perhaps, brought on by the sight of all those blooms for a man whose mother had said good riddance to. When it was my turn to shrug off this mortal coil the force would chip together to send a wreath, and that would be it. If I’d lived a while after retirement, and memories had faded, pensions branch would remind them about me.

  ‘Someone loved him,’ Maggie said, reading one of the dedications.

  ‘It looks like it,’ I replied, adding: ‘Soon as you get chance come back up and collect all the cards.’

  In the car I said: ‘So you’ve decided they were racing.’

  ‘It looks like it,’ Maggie replied. ‘Two identical cars, going nowhere, and the same thing a month ago. Early in the morning when the roads are at their quietest. The gypsies used to do it years ago, with ponies and traps. You remember.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘And huge sums were gambled on the outcome. I wonder if that’s what this was about.’

  ‘It’s what Rodger thinks.’

  ‘He could be right. I spoke to the pathologist this morning.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘Death by multiple injuries consistent with a high-speed motor traffic accident. Traces of alcohol and cocaine in his blood. Minute traces, well below the legal limit for alcohol.’

  ‘Just enough to give him an edge?’ Maggie suggested.

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘In which case he was taking it very seriously. Professional, even.’

  ‘It’s possible. Oh, and he’s a long-term marijuana user.’

  ‘Has anything come back about the gun?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a reactivated Glock, but there’s no history for it. Bear it in mind: we’re dealing with dangerous people. The money came to £500 exactly, in used twenties. Sparky said that’s peanuts these days. Kids go out with that much in their back pockets. A few fingerprints but I haven’t had a report on any matches.’

  We were having tea and sausage rolls in the canteen when Maggie asked: ‘How’s Rosie? Have you seen her lately?’

  It was between break times and there was nobody else in there, except the serving lady. ‘No,’ I replied, squeezing too much brown sauce onto my plate. ‘I rang her last week and she said she’s OK.’

  ‘But she didn’t want to continue the relationship?’

  ‘No.’

  Rosie Barraclough teaches geography and geology at my old school – Heckley Grammar. We’d gone out for a while but Rosie had called it off. She had, she said, too much baggage. My attempts to help her turned to ashes and Rosie was caught in a cycle of depression and remission that was never-ending. Much of the time she was delightful company – amusing and mischievous, with a giggling laugh that had people sitting nearby turning their heads and joining in the fun. But then the memories, the ghosts, would return and soon she’d be back to blaming herself for the sins of the world.

  ‘I’m worried about her,’ I said. ‘I think she needs help, if help exists for that sort of thing.’

  ‘Pills,’ Maggie stated. ‘They work for some people, turn others into zombies.’

  ‘We’ve talked about it, but she says she needs her wits about her when she’s in front of 30-odd teenagers, talking about grain production in Estonia.’

  ‘God, I bet she does. Is she back at school?’

  ‘Yes, went back for the new term. I rang her the first day to see how it had gone and she was happy enough with things.’

  ‘But she didn’t want to see you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you want to see her, Charlie?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Maggie. Not sure at all. Well, yes I do, but…’

  ‘You could do without the hassle.’

  ‘I suppose so. I like her, like her a lot, and I want to help her.’

  ‘But you don’t know what you’d be taking on.’

  ‘It sounds underhand, selfish, when you put it like that, but you could be right. I’d risk it, Maggie, believe me, I’d risk it, but maybe it’s all for the best.’

  Maggie smiled at me. ‘No it’s not, Charlie, and you don’t believe it is, ei
ther. Talk to her. That can’t do any harm, can it? Talking about things is usually the best way. Invite her out on a foursome, or dinner at our place.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘Can’t stay here all day chatting or I’ll have the boss on to me. Got some doors to knock on.’

  I met Rosie when I took an evening class about local geology. I do a lot of walking, and like to know what’s under my feet and all around me. When the course ended I took her out a few times. The truth was, I’d have done anything for her. She’d had a tough life, with lots of disappointments, and had her problems, but she’d the figure of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl and a grin that could halt a charging traffic warden at fifty paces. Her hair was silver and cropped short, and she wore scarlet jeans. My favourite memory was of her waving her geologist’s hammer at me, saying: ‘Ammonites! Ammonites! Bah!’ just because I misidentified a fossil. Every sixth-former in Heckley Grammar was in love with her, and at least one old boy.

  * * *

  There was no evidence that any other vehicle was involved so the inquest into the death of Dale Dobson rubber-stamped a misadventure verdict on him. We’d had a word with the coroner about the possibility that he’d been involved in a race but as the other vehicle was apparently miles away at the time of the crash this wasn’t mentioned in open court. I told the coroner about the fingerprints and DNA, Mrs Dobson confirmed that the body she’d seen was her son, and the coroner released it for disposal. As we emerged into the weak sunlight I caught up with Mrs Dobson and offered her a lift home.

  It wasn’t far, and we drove most of the way in silence. I prompted her to speak about Dale but she was deep in her own thoughts. ‘You don’t know who he was working for, or associating with?’ I asked, but she just shook her head and mumbled an apology.

  ‘Has anybody contacted you, with messages of condolence or anything?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK, but if anybody does will you let me know, please?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I stopped at her door and wrote my name on a CID card for her. She took it from me and unfastened her seatbelt, hesitating, not sure what to say. I thought she was going to ask me in for a cup of tea, which I would have politely declined, but she said: ‘The funeral. Who’ll pay for the funeral? I can’t afford it.’