Tightrope

by Andrea Frazer

  The children had already been escorted up to bed, so she mounted the stairs so that she could kiss them goodnight. Descending, this done, she headed straight for the kitchen. As well as taking the delightfully chilled bottle out of the fridge door, she also checked the microwave where she discovered a plate of chicken and new potatoes, and a note that informed her that there was salad in the fridge. Suddenly, she was absolutely ravenous, and not in the least ashamed. Instead, she felt empowered; she had seen what she wanted, and she had taken it.

  She only drank two glasses of wine that night, and went to bed at a much more respectable time. It was true what the Scots believed. Oats were good for you.

  When Olivia finally got home, it was to find that both Ben and Hibbie had called in, cooked a frozen pizza each, and gone out again. Of Hal, there was no sign.

  ‘Why didn’t you just give me a ring, or text me, Hal?’

  ‘My battery was down.’

  ‘Don’t you have a colleague whose phone you could borrow?’

  ‘I don’t like asking when I’m so new.’

  ‘So, they don’t mind asking you to stay late or go in early, but you haven’t got the nerve to ask if you could borrow a phone?’

  ‘I promise I’ll let you know in future.’

  ‘Just make sure that you do. At least that way I could pick up a takeaway on the way home instead of getting home to find that I’ve got to start cooking.’

  ‘You could always order something by phone.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  INTERLUDE

  They started swarming over it at first light. As dawn broke, the scavengers were crawling over the heaps like flies. Everything was grist to their mill. They were territorial too, but instinctively unsociable. If a new scavenger invaded their space, they would attack and hope to send them packing. This was their world, and they didn’t intend to share it with interlopers.

  One of the first there was tearing at a black plastic bag, determined to get at the contents. Most of the bags had already torn or split, but this seemed like a good quality thick one and there could be rich pickings inside. The fabric fought his efforts, but finally gave up its secret. He stared down at it, first shocked, then revolted, and he let out an animal-like cry. What should he do now?

  Motioning to the others to join him, he indicated his grim discovery and realisation dawned that there was a decision to be made.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Buller called his meeting to order. He had asked them all to be ready on time, if not early, and he had information for them. First, he asked for an update from the team members that he hadn’t managed to catch the day before.

  Lenny Franklin was the first to speak. ‘It looks like we had some duff gen on that house of contraband. I’ve checked out all the local estate agents, and no one will admit to having a lease out on it or letting it. I stayed on late last night to spread the net a bit wider and when I’ve checked my emails, if there’s still nothing definite, I’ll get the name and address of the owner and try to contact them.’

  ‘On the abducted baby case, we’ve had a few sightings, but nothing’s turned up yet,’ offered Olivia. ‘Today, I’ve got someone collecting the key to the grandmother’s house, if that makes sense, to gain access and take copies of more recent photos from her computer. The mother herself hasn’t got a computer or a mobile, and only had a photo of the baby as a newborn. Her mother happens to be away on holiday and her neighbour who holds the key was away for the night. The father’s got a record.’

  Olivia was immediately slapped down. ‘That’s enough from the women’s magazine. Just get on with things and don’t bother me until you’ve got something concrete.’ Buller didn’t like torrents of detail, just results. He was just about to start speaking again when there was a shriek from the mid-distance. ‘Surely not a drunk at this time of the morning,’ he quipped, before one the DCs started to say his piece.

  ‘Did you hear that the woman who was blinded in Gooding Avenue had woken up?’ Desai had decided to be spokesman, as Shuttleworth was in uniform, and at least he had been sitting at her bedside when she was first admitted.

  ‘And?’ Buller was not backward in indicating his impatience.

  ‘Not much. Apparently she got her hand under her bandages and discovered what had happened to her eyes, then she got rather hysterical.’

  ‘In what language? English?’

  ‘No. We don’t know yet.’

  ‘Why the bloody hell not?’

  ‘None of the staff recognised what the language was, and the doctor decided to sedate her again for a while.’

  ‘Fucking marvellous. So, we’re no further forward on who attacked her. You’re a real bunch of limp dicks, aren’t you? Well, fortunately for you, I have got some results. I knew those two were bloody foreigners ever since I clapped eyes on the scene photographs, and I’ve got a couple of names back from my enquiries.

  ‘I’m not even going to try to pronounce the names, but they’ve got a record running all the way from Tirana to Calais, where they were last picked up. Presumably they’ve decided to contaminate our fair country with their criminal activities. They were mainly arrested for drugs, but they’ve done their fair amount of petty crime as well – shoplifting, pickpocketing, that sort of thing. They were generally known as Lena and Michail and I reckon they were just laying low here doing a bit of caretaking work for someone while they got their breath back.

  ‘Now, I want all of you out there speaking to your snouts and anyone else I tell you to, to see if you can get a sniff on who they were connected with and …’

  At that point, the phone on Olivia’s desk rang again. ‘Get it!’ the DCI snapped, ‘and take it in the corridor. I’m trying to solve a major crime here, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ She exited the office with the handset in her hand, only to receive a request to come downstairs to see to Penny Sutcliffe, who was apparently in a bit of a state. ‘And, by the way,’ said the caller, ‘she’s found a dead baby on the doorstep at the back of the station.’

  On reaching the desk, she was directed to the locker room where she found the uniformed officer in tears. ‘What the hell’s this I hear about a dead baby?’ she asked, sitting down on one of the benches and putting an arm around the sergeant’s shoulders. Penny Sutcliffe shuddered in an effort to pull herself together, and looked up at the DI with flooded eyes. ‘Tell me about it? What happened? Where is it?’

  Penny, who had three children and spent a lot of time on desk duty, swapping shifts as she could, to allow her to avoid having to use too much childcare, swallowed hard and began to tell her story. ‘As far as I know, it’s being taken over to Dr MacArthur in a patrol car. The bag it was in has gone to Forensics to examine the stuff on it.’

  ‘What stuff? Start at the beginning.’ Olivia was decidedly short on patience after her falling out with Hal late the previous evening.

  After a bit of throat-clearing, Penny began again. ‘I was just on my way in for duty, and I saw this really messy rubbish bag over near the big bin outside the back door. Well, naturally, I went to pick it up and put it in the bin, wondering who could have done such a thoughtless thing as not to lift it in, but when I went to pick it up, it felt wrong.

  ‘So, I put it back down again and looked inside, and there it was, with its neck all funny. It made me feel quite sick. There was something underneath it, but I couldn’t even bear to look at what it was, in case it was even worse than what I’d just found. Anyway, I managed not to drop it, and took it inside where I alerted Sergeant Fairbanks. He went a bit white when he took it off me and looked inside, then he just told me to go and have a sit down and he’d deal with it.

  ‘I’d had a quick thought as I went over to pick it up that, if it wasn’t someone from the station, then surely people hadn’t started fly-tipping in the station car park, but I had to go to be sick when he went off. That’s some poor woman’s child. She must be absolutely distraught.’
r />   ‘Did Monty say what he was going to do?’

  ‘Just that he’d sort the little body and the bag, and that he’d get back to me.’

  Monty Fairbanks chose that moment to return to the locker room, and informed Olivia that Superintendent Devenish would like a quick word with her, also informing her that he had set an officer to go through the car park CCTV. With a look of sympathy from the sergeant, a shrug of the shoulders and a muttered, ‘What have I done wrong now?’ Olivia bustled off to meet her nemesis.

  When the morning meeting of the team was concluded, Olivia had still not returned and, finding herself in the company of Daz Westbrook, Lauren found herself embarrassed for the first time since the night before. He pointedly avoided eye contact with her, and she, keeping up the charade, looked anywhere but at him, and she thought she’d have to get him on his own sometime to see whether the previous evening was going to be a regular secret or a one-off.

  Was she just a one-night stand, or did he want her to be his ‘fuck buddy’? She wouldn’t mind if he did. It suited her down to the ground, having regular sex but with no strings attached – a thought that quite shocked her when she considered how moral and upright she had been until quite recently. She would tell no one; not even Olivia.

  When she first received the call to go downstairs to see Penny Sutcliffe, Olivia had had hopes, and fears, that they had found Stacey Shillington, and they would now have to trace the abductor or investigate the parents a little further, but on being told that the baby had been a newborn, she had abandoned the idea.

  As she ascended, once more, she wondered what Devenish was going to try to pin on her now. As far as she knew, she had been guilty of no wrong-doing or insubordination since he had given her a bollocking over a case at the end of the previous year.

  At his yell of, ‘Come!’ in response to her timid knock, a shiver ran through her. Whatever it was, she hadn’t done it. He was the sole person who had this effect on her; she wasn’t normally timid.

  He had her stand before his desk for at least thirty seconds of agonisingly slow silence before he spoke. ‘How are you getting on with DCI Buller?’ he asked, unexpectedly.

  ‘We’re very different characters,’ she replied tentatively, ‘but we’re co-operating on the case.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to take you off it.’

  ‘What have I done, sir? What has he said because, whatever it is, it’s simply not true?’

  ‘He hasn’t said anything derogatory about you. He’s a damned good officer, even if his views are a little, what I think we might call, old-fashioned. To change the subject, I’ve been informed that we have had a dead baby, ah, handed in, if I may put it that way. I don’t want DCI Buller and his team to be disturbed too much on this one because he’s making progress. I would, however, like you and DS Groves to take on the cases of the infants.’

  ‘Because we’re women, sir?’

  ‘Not at all: because you’re bloody good officers too, and I want to split the talent so that we can achieve the quickest and best results all round.’ Why was he being so complimentary and diplomatic? Because they were women, of course.

  ‘Thank you for your kind words, sir. And who else from the team would be working with us?’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have only uniformed officers. Now, you know how big and complicated the other case is and, if you involve social services, you’ll have other sympathetic professionals on hand to assist you.’

  Olivia sighed. ‘Yes, sir. Thank you sir.’

  ‘Dismissed.’

  I certainly have been, thought the inspector.

  When she got back to the CID office, she moved her desk and Lauren’s so that they were facing each other at the front of the room, and where they wouldn’t be too much disturbed by the others. She’d just had time to explain that she and her sergeant had been allotted the two cases involving babies, when Terry Friend came bustling self-importantly into the office.

  ‘The CCTV’s been checked,’ she announced, and Lauren beckoned her over.

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘Not a lot. There was a car noticed, but its number plates were covered in mud and dirt, so we don’t have a full number for it – barely a partial, in fact – but someone did get out of it carrying a bag, which they then put near the bin.’

  ‘Anyone –’

  ‘But,’ Terry continued, ‘they were unseasonally dressed in a hoodie and a peaked baseball cap, so there was no sign at all of who it was.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Well, they weren’t wearing a skirt or a dress, but it could’ve been either.’

  ‘So, although we’ve got it captured on CCTV footage, we’re precisely no further forward?’

  ‘Looks like it. Sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘Who’s the most computer literate out of all of you?’

  ‘Penny Sutcliffe,’ the PC replied, without falter.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘A bit more calm, although still upset.’

  ‘There’s nothing much I can do about that, but I do want her to go out to a house that has some photographs on its computer, and I want copies of them sent back directly to me. The owner should be away at the moment, so I’ll give you the address where she can collect the key.’ There had been plenty of time for Mrs Shillington’s neighbour to get back from her daughter’s, and they couldn’t afford to waste any time when a baby’s life or well-being was at risk. It was already twenty-four hours since baby Stacey had been snatched.

  ‘You get yourself back downstairs and see if any more has come up on the baby’s body.’ Terry scooted off obediently, and Olivia looked across at Lauren. There was something wrong, and she couldn’t work out what it was. It might be something to do with the kids and school, or even the old biddy who looked after them, but she couldn’t leave it without asking.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ she asked across the two desks, only to have Lauren’s eyes scoot furtively across to the main body of the room before settling on her, with an unconvincing smile on her face. ‘Come on, spit it out,’ she encouraged her, but to no avail.

  ‘There’s absolutely nothing bothering me, boss; nothing wrong whatsoever.’

  ‘You can’t fool me, you know.’

  Lauren’s face was suddenly awash with thunderclouds as she snapped, ‘Will you leave me alone? I’ve already told you that there’s nothing wrong. Why won’t you leave me be?’

  God! She was touchy today. Maybe Kenneth had been in contact and upset her. ‘Pax!’ she replied and her phone rewarded her withdrawal by ringing to distract the two of them from a possible falling-out.

  It was Terry Friend again, not wishing to tackle the stairs a second time, and excited by what she had just found out. ‘Initial thoughts are that the plastic bag came from the tip,’ she said. Littleton-on-Sea’s local authority was notoriously lax in its waste management and recycling and, unbelievably, everything was just dumped at the municipal tip in a series of huge mountains of rubbish, with only the tiny amount of what had been put into recycling bins set aside – a pointless, time-wasting exercise that didn’t save the tight-fisted council any money anyway.

  ‘Get the duty officers to send what officers he can to sniff around for the car or anyone acting suspiciously, and get whoever went through the CCTV footage on the car park to go through the tip stuff – anything from midnight onwards.’

  ‘Will do, ma’am.’

  Although she’d had a quiet word with Buller about the change in case allocation, he didn’t seem to have passed it on to all of his officers, because Desai approached her with the information that he’d had a call from Ali Shah. He had seen the couple from the television appeal for information on their identities, as they had been into his shop.

  ‘Get out to interview him, but give any information, in future, to DCI Buller. DS Groves and I are now exclusively on the abduction and infant death cases.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Damn, this was hard, being side-l
ined like this, but she could only suppose it was because Buller was a ‘man’s man’, and so was Devenish, under all that sexual and racial equality bullshit he hid behind. She knew what the man under the façade was like, and he was thoroughly bigoted, unlike Buller, who wore his prejudices on his sleeve for all to see.

  It would get him into trouble one of these days, Hardy thought, but he was doing all right for the moment. God help him if he ever worked for a woman officer who outranked him – she’d rip him to ribbons, whilst casually castrating him on the way. As far as Hardy was concerned she didn’t have to work with him long-term, so she could just grit her teeth and get on with things. Maybe it was his personality that was grating on Lauren, though? She’d have to ask her when they were somewhere a little more private.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Penny Sutcliffe had driven off to get the key from Mrs Shillington’s neighbour so that she could get the photographs from her computer, glad to have something else to do beside think about what she had discovered that morning. It was hardly an onerous task, but concentrating on the road kept her mind occupied.

  The neighbour had been in about half an hour when she got there and offered her a cup of tea along with the keys to the house next door, but she refused it. She was thinking, again, of the little body she had come across at the start of her shift, and she would not be able to make small talk, and didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag – she winced as her mind made the analogy – before the matter had gone public.

  She let herself into Mrs Shillington’s house, having noticed what an upmarket area it was in, and how nicely the interior was decorated and furnished. There were tasteful pictures on the walls, and a variety of antiques on the surfaces of various pieces of furniture. A quick memory of the owner’s daughter’s address made her stop in her tracks. How had the two generations become so detached from each other’s lifestyles?

  The neighbour had told her that Mrs Shillington kept her computer on a desk at the back of the property, and she headed off in search of it. She already had the password, and it should not take long to find and send copies of the photographs to the DI.