by M A Comley
“So, Burt, retirement won’t be long now.”
“Yep, looking forward to it, after forty years on the job.”
“And exemplary service, it’s been.”
“Nice of you to say so, ma’am.”
“And knowing you, you’ll enjoy every minute of your retirement, eh?”
He threw her one of his broad smiles that she would miss when he left.
“I’d better see what the chief wants, then. Can you contact the incident room for me? Let the team know the meeting will be delayed a few minutes?”
“Roger that, ma’am,” he replied, reaching for the phone.
Lorne poked her head around the chief’s door. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Come in. Take a seat, Lorne. I shan’t be a moment.” He didn’t look up from the pile of documents he was signing and handing back to his secretary. He dismissed the older woman, who scurried from the room.
“What happened to you?” he asked, indicating the plaster over her eye.
Lorne hesitated, wondering if she should confide in him, but decided against it when she noticed how pale he looked. “Oh, it’s nothing. The dog tripped me up last night, and I head-butted the door,” she told him, avoiding eye contact.
He eyed her suspiciously, knew she was lying, but Lorne could tell he wasn’t willing to press her further. He sighed. “Fill me in on the body discovered last night, will you?”
“Nothing much to tell yet, sir. There was no form of identification found at the scene. Dental records are a no-go, as the head was missing. Someone did everything they could to hinder us. The victim’s right arm is missing, and the fingers on the left hand were chopped off at the knuckles.”
He bounced back and forth in his chair as Lorne gave him her report. “You couldn’t have got much sleep last night, Lorne.”
That’s strange. He’s never been concerned about my sleep before.
“About four hours, I guess—average for this job, I suppose. I’ll be fine once I’ve had my first six cups of coffee.” She laughed, but his brow remained furrowed.
“I’m worried about you. That last case you solved must have taken a lot out of you. Going undercover is never easy, especially when you have to deal with scum like that. You look a bit peaky. I can arrange for you to talk to someone, if you like.”
There was no denying that her last case had taken its toll on her. She’d been asked by The Serious Crime Squad to pose as a madame of a newly opened massage parlour. All the regular girls had been WPCs. They’d had intelligence that a gang headed by Gripper Jones, a notorious dirtbag in the community and business partner of her long-time nemesis The Unicorn, was demanding protection money from the other parlours in the area.
Once the protection commenced, they forced the owners to employ illegal immigrant girls, supplied by the gangs. The girls’ families back home were badly beaten if the girls refused to work for the gang. Lorne’s world had been turned upside-down—even Tom didn’t have a clue what she had been involved in.
Although they caught Jones and his gang, Lorne had been roughed up a little before reinforcements had arrived. Just a few bruises here and there, but mentally her scars ran deep, which was why she needed Tom’s support. Perhaps she had been wrong to not tell him about the case, and maybe her decision was backfiring.
“I’m fine. What’s going on, boss? This isn’t like you.” She knew seeing a shrink would only add to her problems, but his concern puzzled her.
He shuffled a few papers on the desk before him—it was his turn to avoid eye contact. She feared the worst. “What I’m about to tell you goes no further.”
“Of course. That goes without saying, boss.”
“I’m leaving.”
A ten-tonne truck couldn’t have hit her harder. Her mouth flew open. “You’re what?” she whispered.
“My, what a lot of fillings you have, my dear,” Jeff Chalmers joked, trying to make light of the situation. “I’m taking early retirement. I wanted you to be the first to know.”
Lorne shook her head in disbelief. “Excuse my ignorance, sir, but forty-eight isn’t considered that old, is it?” She was babbling, didn’t know what else to say.
Reluctantly he admitted, “Ill health, I’m afraid—something I’d rather not discuss. You understand, don’t you, Lorne?”
His gaze switched to the family photo proudly standing on his desk. In it was his beautiful wife Anne, whom he described as having a red-hot temper to match the colour of her hair. Alongside her sat their two strapping sons, who had both graduated from law school over the past few years. He proudly called them ‘the oxygen in my life.’
She watched him closely, saw the changing expressions in his face as his finger traced his family, one by one. Lorne feared the worst. She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but there was a tiny part of her that couldn’t bear to hear the truth.
No, no, I don’t bloody understand. She was losing the best boss she’d ever had the privilege of working with. His departure meant she’d have to spend years proving her worth again. Shit and double shit, as if her life wasn’t hard enough at the moment.
You selfish bitch! she reprimanded herself. Jeff has just told you he’s ill, seriously ill, and all you can think about is your own misfortune. “I don’t know what to say, sir. When are you leaving?”
“Two weeks.”
“Two weeks,” she screeched, like a frustrated parrot. “Can I ask who the new chief will be?”
He glanced down at his desk. “It hasn’t been decided yet. I doubt they’ll consider promoting anyone around here,” he told her, no doubt with little satisfaction.
There was nothing left for either of them to say. With a heavy heart, Lorne left the room. She threw herself dejectedly against the wall outside his office, which was where Pete found her minutes later.
“Fiver for your thoughts? That’s inflation for ya,” he said buoyantly, mimicking her position against the wall.
“You could pay me all the money in the world, and it still wouldn’t be worth me telling you what I’m thinking, Pete…”
“Time’s getting on, boss. We’ve got a killer to find.”
“What are you holding me up for, then? I haven’t got time for idle chitchat, man.” She propelled herself away from the wall, and Pete broke into stride beside her as they marched down the long grey corridor towards the incident room.
CHAPTER SIX
The team, more boisterous than normal, failed to notice Lorne and Pete’s arrival.
Mitch was bragging about his latest conquest, “So I said to her, ‘How would you like your eggs in the morning, darlin’? And get this, she replied, ‘Fertilised will do.’ Jesus, can you believe that? And I thought I had an answer for everything. I can tell you she certainly floored me with that one.”
“If you’ve quite finished, DS Mitchell,” Lorne warned.
Mitchell looked embarrassed. If it had been any other day, Lorne would have been the first to rib him about his male prowess not being up to much. But not that day. With all she’d encountered already that morning, her sense of humour had gone AWOL.
“You’re probably all aware that Pete and I were called out to a suspected homicide last night.”
Pete handed her an envelope containing the crime scene photos. She passed the set of ten-by-eight-inch photos around as she spoke. “Tracy, I want you and Mitch to carry out the door-to-doors. Specifically around the entrance to the forest, a few hundred yards either way. Someone must’ve seen or heard something. The teenage lovers, the only witnesses we have at the moment, were down there last week and are sure the body wasn’t there then.”
The photos returned to her one by one, and she passed them to Pete, who pinned them up on the notice board.
“Was there any form of ID, ma’am?” asked Sergeant Tracy Cox, the newest member of the team.
“Nothing. The search teams are out there now. The pathologist’s early assumption is that the crime was committed elsewhere; therefore I don’t
hold out much hope of finding anything substantial at the scene.”
“How did the victim die? Obviously, we can all see her head was cut off, but—I mean, was that the actual COD?” Mitch asked, his frivolity forgotten.
“Again, waiting on the path’s report. It appears the torso suffered several blows with a blunt instrument. It’s anyone’s guess what condition the head will be in, if or when we find it.”
“Do we know when the crime occurred?” DS John Fox queried.
Lorne shook her head. “Until it’s substantiated by the report, we can’t give a definite answer, but the doc suspected it happened approximately a month ago. John, I’d like you and Molly to trawl through the missing persons’ database. Widen the area to, say, a fifty-mile radius of the forest.”
“That could take hours,” Molly moaned, pulling a face as if she was about to get a bikini wax.
At thirty-five, Molly Cornell was the one member of the team Lorne found hard to tolerate—she suspected envy often got in the way of the woman’s work. Lorne had confronted her numerous times about her lousy attitude disrupting the team. But Molly had always insisted there was nothing intentional in her attitude.
“It’ll take as long as necessary, Molly,” Lorne snapped.
Pete took over before anything escalated between the two women. “Molly, leads are thin on the ground at this stage of the enquiry. So we have to make a start somewhere, right?”
Molly smiled sarcastically and turned back to her computer.
Lorne’s eyes blazed with fury as she stared at the back of Molly’s head. She could do without another confrontation. Pete was the master at dealing with Molly’s obdurate behaviour, and Lorne was happy for him to step in. “Pete, get in touch with neighbouring forces. See if any body parts have turned up. That includes the river police.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Lorne left the group to get on with their tasks and walked through to her office. She rang Arnaud’s secretary, who informed her that the post-mortem report wouldn’t be finalised until late afternoon.
After she completed hours of mindless paperwork, Pete came to rescue her. His suggestion of grabbing a bite to eat was just the tonic she needed. Her head was pounding, and her stomach felt empty after missing out on breakfast.
They decided to eat at a little Italian restaurant on the edge of town.
The waiter placed a bowl of penne pasta topped with a tomato and basil sauce in front of Lorne. “Did Molly find anything of use?”
Pete delayed answering until the waiter had served him his lasagne and side order of chips. “We’ve got three missing women to follow up on. They all disappeared about a month ago. A twenty-two-year-old—looks as though she’s run off with an old boyfriend. Next, a forty-six-year-old bank assistant who suspiciously vanished along with ten grand from the safe—she’s a possible. Finally, we have a woman in her sixties who should’ve turned up for a family christening. Her family listed her as missing a week later.”
“Why the delay?”
“It’s a regular occurrence—her taking off and forgetting to tell the family, I mean.” Between large mouthfuls of lasagne, he rattled off the details of possible victims.
Lorne listened but kept her eyes focused on her meal; she found her partner’s eating habits disgusting. A sandwich from the local deli was usually a far less messy option. “We haven’t got a definite age from Arnaud yet, so until we do, we better check out the two older likely candidates. There’s no way that was a body of a twenty-two-year-old.”
Lorne finished her meal and washed it down with a glass of iced water. “While we’re on the subject of Molly, what the fuck is her problem? Next time you see her, remind her she’s on a final warning for her bad attitude, will you? Because if I have to put up with any more of her unnecessary crap…”
“Yeah, she knows she’s on a final warning. She just takes pleasure in winding you up, boss. I’ll have a word when I can. The only thing I can say in her defence is that she comes up with the goods. Without her, we wouldn’t have these names to go on. Leave her to me; I’ll sort her.”
Lorne glanced out the window then back at him and asked, “Have you brought the details of the missing women with you?”
“Yup. I guessed you’d want to start chasing things up straight away. I thought we’d start with Sharron Fishland. She works—or worked, I should say—at the DFL bank in Castleway, about twenty minutes from here.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lorne drove, much to the ‘Sherman tank’ driver’s annoyance.
“You might want to wipe the remains of your dinner off your chin before we begin questioning people, Pete,” Lorne suggested before they got out of the car.
“I was saving that bit for Ron.” The puzzled look on her face forced him to explain the joke. “Later on, Ron—get it? I despair of you at times, boss. Your sense of humour—or lack of it—can be so embarrassing.”
“Oh. Sorry, Pete, was that supposed to be funny?” She shook her head and rolled her eyes as they both got out of the car.
They entered the busy bank and joined the long queue.
“If there’s one thing we Brits love to do more than talk about the weather, it’s bloody stand in queues all day,” Pete grumbled, shuffling nervously from one foot to the other.
“Stop complaining, and stop fidgeting. You seem damn suspicious. One of the girls will probably push the panic button soon,” Lorne told him, voice hushed.
Finally, the computerised announcer invited them to make their way to cashier number three. Lorne produced her ID card and asked the attractive blonde if the manager was free to see them.
“I’ll just check for you. One moment, please.” The cashier wriggled off her high stool and made her way to the rear of the bank, swaying her oversized rear as she went.
“Jesus, it’s like watching two Pitbull terriers having a fight in her knickers. I bet she has to wear those extra large ones like Bridget Jones,” Pete crudely observed.
Lorne fought hard not to smirk but failed miserably.
The blonde returned moments later, her ample bosom fighting against the half cups of a bra that were obviously a few sizes too small.
“The manager won’t be long. If you’d like to take a seat at the other end of the counter, he’ll come through that door.” The girl aimed her husky reply and dazzling smile at Pete, totally disregarding Lorne.
They headed for the place the woman had indicated. “It would appear you have an admirer.”
“Huh, some catch. She’s the type that turns a man gay. I bet most of the unfortunate guys she tangles in her web probably end up pleading for someone to cut their dicks off, before she wears them out,” he replied, surprisingly straight-faced, as they waited by the door.
Lorne wondered if Pete was speaking from experience.
A well-dressed man in his early forties came to collect them a few minutes later. As he approached, his right hand shook when he slicked back his greying hair, before the same hand straightened the large knot in his pink tie. “I’m Charles Timmins, the manager. How can I help you?” he asked, from the other side of the secured door.
“DI Simpkins, and this is DS Childs. Is there somewhere more private where we can talk, Mr. Timmins?” Lorne flashed her warrant card.
“My office. Unfortunately, I can only spare you five minutes, as I have an appointment with a customer. Can’t be late for that; the bank prides itself on punctuality.” Timmins opened the door, let the two officers in, and bolted it after Pete.
“That’s generous of him,” Pete whispered sarcastically, as they followed Timmins up the corridor to his office.
Timmins’s office was much grander than Lorne anticipated. A large cherrywood desk dominated the room, and matching filing cabinets lined one wall. As Lorne glanced around, she noticed several framed certificates for ‘Manager of the Month’ proudly arranged on the wall behind his big leather chair.
“What can I do for you, Inspector?” Timmins smiled and motioned
for them to take a seat.
“We’re here about Miss Fishland. We wondered if she’s turned up yet?” Lorne asked, notebook at the ready.
“You mean you haven’t found her?” Timmins snapped back unexpectedly.
“Not yet. We’d like a few more details, to further our enquiries.”
“Like what? I told the fraud squad everything I know. The bitch ran off with ten grand. What other information do you need, for Christ’s sake?”
Lorne’s suspicion grew along with his aggression. “Personal details, like her height and weight. Do you happen to have a staff photo of her?”
“Surely, you should be asking her family questions like that?” Timmins appeared bemused.
“I’m asking you, Mr. Timmins. We haven’t managed to locate any of her family yet,” she lied convincingly. “So, do you have one?”
He pointed to a group staff photo hanging on the wall. “That’s her in the middle.”
“It’s not very clear. Do you have another one?” Lorne’s patience was beginning to falter.
Timmins wandered over to the filing cabinet, retrieved a key from his waistcoat pocket, and opened the third drawer down. After locating the missing woman’s personnel file, he relocked the drawer and returned to his desk, file in hand.
Pete and Lorne exchanged a knowing glance. The photo he showed them bore no resemblance to the body lying in the mortuary. This woman was much taller and stockier. Lorne asked for a copy of the photo, despite knowing it would be of no use to their enquiries.
“I want that bitch caught, Inspector.”
“Do you always speak of your staff so highly, Mr. Timmins?”
“She stole from this bank, and guess what? It’s me who’s left with the tarnished record. The quicker you find her and that money, the quicker I can return this bank to where it belongs—top. Before this happened, this branch was number one in the region. Since the bad publicity in the local press, the customers are departing in droves, and it’s all thanks to Miss Fishland.”