Tightrope

by Andrea Frazer

  It was going to be a long day.

  When they finally left the house a deafening half-hour later, they were thirty minutes older, but not a jot wiser about what had happened in number three. As they walked down the garden path, they saw a man in leather jacket and jeans, despite the warmth of the day, approaching the door of number three, and Franklin called to him. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going, mate?’

  The officer on duty outside the front door jumped. He had been miles away, thinking of his summer holiday in Ibiza, and had been oblivious to the presence of any of them.

  The man walked slowly across the scrubby lawn to them and said in a quiet voice, ‘DS Jenner, drugs squad and newly appointed crime scene manager, and I’ve got a sniffer dog arriving here shortly, just so you know. And you are?’

  It was going to be a very long day.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hardy found Police Community Support Officers Winston Harris and Claire Strickland in the canteen, the latter still rather whey-faced, an untouched sandwich on a plate in front of her, already beginning to curl at the corners. Harris was evidently made of sterner stuff. He was shovelling shepherd’s pie and chips into his mouth as the senior officer arrived, and nearly choked in his efforts to swallow and greet her at the same time. She had a reputation for being short-tempered and for not tolerating fools gladly, and he didn’t want to get on the wrong side of her.

  ‘Whoa there, Harris. I’m not so beautiful that I’m worth dying for.’

  ‘No, ma’am,’ he replied, at which Olivia adopted a furious expression and said,

  ‘How could you agree with me? That’s hardly the behaviour of a gentleman.’

  The young officer looked confused until Olivia let a smile loose on her face, and he realised she was just making a joke to lighten the atmosphere. God knows, it could do with it, considering what that morning had delivered to them. Maybe her reputation was just a bit exaggerated. ‘I don’t want to curtail your lunch break, so when you’ve finished, could you come upstairs to the CID office for a chat about earlier?’

  When she got back to her office, she found a man dressed in black denim and a grey suede jacket sitting in her chair.

  ‘Who the hell are you, and what are you doing at my desk?’

  ‘I, dear lady, am Chief Inspector Buller from the drugs squad and I am here to take over this case.’ He didn’t move from the chair, but stared at her as if she were an exhibit under a microscope, so that she was suddenly aware of her somewhat scruffy appearance.

  ‘Firstly, I am no one’s “dear lady” – and, secondly, under whose authority are you here?’ she almost shouted. ‘I am a CID inspector and I am running this case.’

  ‘I’m, afraid you’re sadly mistaken, Inspector. Superintendent Devenish has requested the presence of both me and my sergeant, Mike Jenner, who is, as we speak, settling in as crime scene manager. This case is a co-operation between you, drugs, and HMRC, and I’ve been asked to head it up. Things would run more smoothly if we could get on with each other, but it’s not compulsory.’

  Olivia bit her lip. So, she was still under a cloud as far as Devenish was concerned; he still didn’t trust her. Presumably, if she didn’t accept his decision, her rank would be at risk, if not her job. She’d have to curb her temper and live with it, although uneasily. She knew co-operation between different departments and agencies was necessary, but she thought that the murder should have some prominence.

  Taking a deep breath, she asked, as politely as she could, if he would leave her office for a short while as she was expecting a visit from the officers who were first on the scene.

  ‘I don’t think I can comply with that request, Inspector. As SIO, I really should be here for that.’

  You bastard, she thought, although not voicing her opinion. There was a knock on her door, and she called out, ‘Come in,’ while indicating with her head that she wanted Buller to vacate her chair. Again, he made no attempt to do so, and she moved rapidly to perch on another desk so that it didn’t look so much as if she had been ousted.

  Harris and Strickland moved into the room, looking from one occupant to the other, not quite sure what to do, or who to attend to. After a deep inhalation of breath, she said, ‘This is Chief Inspector Buller from the drugs squad. We will be working in tandem on this case, so you can talk to both of us. Pull up a chair so we can go through exactly what happened this morning.’ With an effort, she reined in her resentment, but she had a feeling that she and Buller weren’t going to get on, and she was already thinking of him as Buller the Bully.

  ‘So, how come you were first on the scene?’ Buller asked. ‘Tell me about it, in as much detail as possible.’ Hardy’s mouth had opened to speak, but she’d been pipped at the post, and now shut it, looking a little like a goldfish. He’d beaten her to the line; in her own office; on a case that she felt she should be running. He was blatantly undermining her authority.

  ‘We got a call that there had been a complaint about shouting and screaming, and we’d only just left the station, so we said we’d take it.’ This came from Strickland, her voice still shaky from the shock of what they had discovered.

  ‘Did you see anyone fleeing the property?’ asked Buller.

  ‘The only people we saw were neighbours who had come outside to see what all the noise was about, but it was quiet when we got there.’

  ‘That’s good. Now, tell me what you found when you got inside. How did you get in?’

  ‘The door wasn’t locked or latched, so we just walked in.’

  ‘What did you see first?’

  ‘The place looked abandoned – no furniture, no pictures, nothing, except for this pair of feet.’ Strickland stuttered to a halt at this point, and Harris looked at her with concern.

  ‘Go on. Who did these feet belong to? What did you see?’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t. Don’t ask me to talk about it.’ Strickland was close to tears.

  Buller had already had enough of pussyfooting around. ‘Get on with it. Do your duty.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Olivia interrupted. ‘She’s very young and she’s very new to the job.’

  ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.’

  With a sharp intake of breath, Olivia regained control of herself, bit her tongue and asked Harris to continue on their behalf.

  ‘I want Strickland to give me her view of the scene.’ Buller wasn’t giving up, and Strickland put her face in her hands and sobbed.

  ‘Strickland, go home. You’re obviously suffering from shock. Harris, you carry on.’

  ‘How dare you overrule me,’ Buller barked but, fortunately, Harris cut across him with his description of the scene that had greeted them in the house.

  ‘It was just inside the first room to the right. There was a woman lying there, her limbs at funny angles. I couldn’t work out what was strange about her at first, and then it suddenly came to me that her eyes had gone. They simply weren’t in her face any more. There wasn’t a lot of light. It was difficult to see details.

  ‘My partner here was sick, and I accidentally trod on one of the woman’s eyes,’ offered Harris. Strickland made a retching sound as he said this, and got a tissue out of her pocket.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I thought she was dead, but she was moaning quietly, and her fingers were twitching, and I wondered how anyone could be alive after what had happened to her. After calling for medical help, we carried on checking the ground floor and we found the remains of that poor man in the kitchen. Claire was in a bit of a state by then, shaking all over, so I put her into another room where there was an old chair, settled her there, and then made my way through the rest of the house.’

  ‘And just where do you think you’re going?’ roared Buller, as Claire Strickland crept, mouse-like, towards the door.

  ‘She’s going home, Chief Inspector. She’s not medically fit for work in the state she’s in,’ Olivia challenged him.

  ‘Then she needs
to grow a backbone and a thicker skin. Stay here!’

  ‘Go on, Strickland, shoo. Get yourself off home.’

  The young woman looked stricken and only left when Hardy went over, put an arm around her shoulder, and led her out into the corridor. ‘Don’t come back until you’re feeling better,’ she advised, guiding her towards the staircase.

  Re-entering the room, she gave Buller a murderous look and asked Harris to continue his narrative.

  ‘It was the second floor that was the most weird,’ he said, near the end of his story. ‘There were three doors, all with this really bright light coming from under them, and when I went in there, the whole place had been knocked into one huge space. All the walls, the floor and the ceiling had been lined with plastic and covered in tinfoil, with insulation sticking out at the seams. Even the windows were covered. There were fans blowing, and a huge extractor going into these flexible metal pipes, which were fed into the chimney breast.

  ‘I suppose that was because of the smell – it was skunk – and the plants were obviously thriving on it. They were really bushy and healthy looking. Anyway, when I’d shown the paramedics where the woman was, and pointed out the man, just so they could check he was dead, I checked the electricity meter, and it had been disconnected, and none of the power was being paid for. Naughty, but nowhere on the same scale as the rest of the stuff in that house.’

  At that moment, there was a perfunctory knock on the door and Groves burst in looking peeved, saying, ‘Boss, O’Brien and Westbrook are back, but … oh, I didn’t realise you had company.’ She had only just noticed Buller at Olivia’s desk.

  ‘And who might you be?’ he asked impertinently.

  ‘DS Groves, and I need to speak to DI Hardy urgently.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to have a little chat with me instead.’

  ‘I have no idea who the hell you are, and we are working on an important case,’ she replied, as Olivia winced at this uncharacteristically confrontational attitude.

  ‘I, my dear, am DCI Buller from the drugs squad and, for your information, I am now the SIO on this case. So, what do you want to say to me?’

  Groves blushed at her faux pas and began to stutter out her story. ‘DI Hardy asked me to link up with two of the DCs, get two lists of names from our records officer, and go out interviewing people to see if I could uncover anything about this morning’s find.’

  ‘None of you will go blundering off into my territory without my say so,’ he informed her firmly. ‘Now, where are these other two DCs, so that I can put them straight?’

  ‘They said they were coming back here,’ the sergeant answered uncertainly, looking fruitlessly round the office.

  ‘What time is it?’ Olivia looked at her watch, and added, ‘I should check the canteen. Knowing those two, they’ll probably be shovelling chips down their throats by now. Gotta feed the inner man.’

  Buller sneered at the DI, looked lecherously at Groves and said, ‘Come on, darlin’, let’s go find these two master detectives and see what they’ve got to say for themselves. We can get a few things straight while we’re at it: like, who’s in charge. We’ll leave Frumpty Dumpty here to finish off with PC Wooden-top.’

  As their footsteps faded away, Harris called after them, ‘I’m a Community Officer, not a PC,’ and Hardy let go of the breath she hadn’t been aware that she was holding, in absolute fury.

  ‘Who the hell does he think he is?’ she hissed dangerously.

  ‘He said he was a Detective Chief Inspector.,’ Harris offered quietly. ‘I think that means he holds all the aces.’

  ‘Well, he’d better watch his back. If I get the chance to slip a metaphorical knife between his shoulder blades, I shall bloody well do it. Write your report, Harris. I’m not in the mood for discussion now.’

  Seating herself at her now vacated desk, Hardy switched on her computer and noticed that the preliminary crime scene report from Forensics was in, along with the crime scene photographs, some of which, it would appear, had been taken by the quick-thinking Harris on his phone, before the paramedics could do their job. God, they were grim, those first photographs: the eyeless face a stomach-churning abomination, the state of the man’s body in the kitchen resembling a scene from an abattoir.

  ‘Damn!’ she cursed out loud. She’d been so thrown by Buller’s attitude that she hadn’t had time to ask him if they had any intel on that address. She wasn’t aware of any markers, but she’d need to check. She read through the preliminary forensic report as well, and was just about to enquire how things were going at the house when Lauren burst into the room.

  ‘The bastard!’ she spat, naming no one, but in no doubt that Olivia knew exactly whom she meant.

  ‘I concur. What’s your particular beef? Apart from the obvious.’

  ‘That shit just bulldozed into the canteen, dragged Daz and Teddy away from their lunch then gave all three of us an ear-bashing about alerting suspects that we were on to them. Your orders went right out of the window,’ she snarled, even though she hadn’t agreed with them, ‘and said we were not to concern ourselves with any aspects of this case that involved illegal drugs.’

  ‘He can’t do that!’ Olivia was fuming all over again. ‘That’ll completely handcuff us. This whole thing is about illegal drugs. Why else would those two have been attacked? One of them’s dead, for God’s sake.’

  The office door was knocked politely and Desai walked in, just back from the hospital, his face a little anxious. ‘Hello,’ Olivia greeted him, letting down the steam on her own personal pressure cooker. ‘How did you get on with the fingerprints? How’s the woman? Have you got an identity yet?’

  ‘I had a bit of a problem with the deceased,’ he said, his face screwing up slightly.

  ‘How come? How can you have a “bit of a problem” taking the fingerprints of a corpse?’

  ‘The top two joints of his right index finger were missing.’

  ‘Bummer. So what did you do?’

  ‘I used the middle finger instead, but took the left index finger as well just to be sure.’

  ‘And? I can hardly stand the suspense.’

  ‘Nothing on the PNC. Same with the woman.’

  ‘This whole situation gets crazier by the hour. Has she spoken yet?’

  ‘No, she’s sedated and she was just off to theatre when I left. Shuttleworth is staying there as ordered until he’s relieved and, if there’s any change when she comes back, he’ll radio in. When she does come round, though, I’d be willing to bet that she’ll be in a hell of a state, what with the eyes thing.’

  ‘It’s bloody grim, isn’t it, knowing that you’re never going to see anything again, and that you’re so disfigured?’

  ‘And we’ve got a new problem here and his name’s Chief Inspector Buller from Drugs,’ announced Lauren, made bold by her ill-temper.

  ‘Devenish has apparently put him in charge of the case,’ Olivia informed him before he could ask anything. ‘And he’s installed his sergeant at the scene as crime scene manager.’

  ‘What shall I do?’ asked Desai.

  ‘Get yourself off, with Sergeant Groves here, to the houses behind Gooding Avenue and see what you can pick up from door-to-door. By the way, Sergeant, what happened to O’Brien and Westbrook after Buller finished chewing them out?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I was just dismissed like a cheap tart at a party. Ask the bully boy when you see him.’

  ‘I hope you’re feeling more civil when you’re speaking to members of the public.’

  ‘Sorry, boss.’ Lauren, after some time, had finally landed on this mode of address for the inspector, both of them disliking ‘ma’am’ and ‘guv’.

  When he had dismissed Groves, Buller allowed the two DCs to finish their lunch before discussing the lists that Fairbanks had provided the sergeant with, and of which he had relieved her in her final moments in the canteen. ‘Now, lads, we’re going to go through these names, and I’m going to indicate which ones I’ll allow yo
u to talk to. Leave the others to Mike Jenner and me.

  ‘We haven’t had any word at all about this particular little factory, so I reckon it’s either someone branching out, or a newbie just setting up. I’ll put the word out on the street that there’s a buyer looking for skunk in bulk, and see what I get back. Oh, and while you’re out there, call into all the estate agents and see which of them is renting out the property.’

  Buller didn’t have a problem dealing with men, but it was different when he was supposed to co-operate with women. He was going through a very vitriolic divorce at the moment, and he had never come to terms with women in authority. He was very much of the ‘keep ’em barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen’ brigade, which was probably why he would not rise any higher in rank that he had already.

  He used to be able to keep a lot of his feelings schtum, but since the divorce had got under way it was a different matter. He was now a committed misogynist, believing that women should be kept in their place – a place at the bottom of the heap, or in the case of the police service, making teas and coffees for the male officers.

  It was to be expected that he would get on well with Daz Westbrook, who was a great believer in male superiority. He would have done better in taking a lesson from Teddy O’Brien, who believed in equality and always gave ‘the fairer sex’ their crack of the whip. After all, his mother had been sharp as a razor, and nobody had ever got one over on her.

  ‘I’ll also get the chopper to take a few sweeps over, see if anyone else is of the same enterprising mind,’ Buller added. At that early point in their relationship, Daz Westbrook blotted his copybook.

  ‘Do you mean the Helicopter Response Unit?’ he asked, with a smirk.

  ‘You know bloody well what I mean, sonny! Don’t get smart with me, or I’ll kick your arse for you. Now, where was I? Right, if we’re lucky, the Helicopter Response Unit might pick up something not so well insulated and letting off more heat. That thermal imaging camera that they carry could uncover a fresh turd in a five acre field. And, you never know; we might pick up a few others who are of a similar enterprising mind. The stuff I hate, though, is this skunk. If we could just get it separated out from the old hashish, we could decriminalise that and just go after the stinky stuff. That’s the thing that drives kids psychotic. In my opinion.’