To Catch a Rabbit

by Helen Cadbury

  Carly came to his rescue and lead him to the bar. ‘That was a nifty move. Kansetsu Waza, if I’m not much mistaken.’

  ‘Sounds like something off the buffet.’ He rubbed his wrist.

  ‘It’s Jiu Jitsu. I must ask her where she trains.’ Carly said. ‘And you were being an arsehole.’

  ‘Should I apologise? I should, shouldn’t I?’

  But he was saved the trouble by the appearance in the doorway of a man in a very slick pinstripe suit. Lizzie flashed a hard smile at no one in particular, wished them all a happy Christmas and left with the suit.

  ‘Who was that?’ Sandy joined them at the bar. ‘Nice looking feller. That her bloke?’

  ‘That’s Guy of the Rovers. He drives an Audi TT.’ And he’s a wanker, Sean thought to himself, and ordered another JD and Coke.

  Arieta had taken up residence on the settee. Since she’d arrived, she’d woken early, tidied her bedclothes into a neat pile, opened the curtains and was usually reading a magazine at the kitchen table by the time Sean or Maureen were up. She usually offered him a coffee and would have cooked him breakfast, if he’d let her. She talked about the weather or something she’d seen on TV, but she wouldn’t tell him any more about her life. She seemed content to live from day to day, watching television with Maureen and doing the crosswords in the puzzle magazines that filled the coffee table. She hadn’t left the house, apart from standing in the back garden to have a cigarette. It was as if she was waiting for something, a sign that it was safe to move on. She appeared to have forgiven him for his play-acting and claimed to have known all along that he wasn’t from a church.

  ‘Too nice looking,’ she said.

  On Christmas morning he discovered she’d helped Maureen pack his stocking. She bounced up and down on the sofa as he opened it.

  ‘If I had little brother, he would be like you.’

  The last thing out of the old football sock - after the sweets and the apple and the satsuma, the playing cards and the joke book - wrapped so tightly he thought it was just more tissue paper, was a small square of fine cotton lace-work. When he held it up to the light, he could see it was a picture of a goose.

  ‘One day I fly south again, like goose. You have something to remember me by. It is only small because I have little time. But I remember what my grandmother taught me.’

  ‘It’s lovely.’ He had no idea what he was supposed to do with it but Maureen came to his rescue. She’d bought him a postcard frame that fitted it perfectly, the delicate white pattern set off against the black card background.

  They divided the turkey roast between three and Arieta cried into her sherry because, she said, she was so happy.

  On Boxing Day he was back on duty. He polished his left shoe until it shone, picked up the right shoe and held it close to his face. He’d already cleaned it, but there was a little mark, just off centre, near the toe. He spat and rubbed, as if having clean shoes would make pacing the estate any more enticing. He took the hi-vis jacket from the back of the kitchen chair. Police Community Support Officer, in big silver letters on a blue background. He liked it when people called him officer. It didn’t happen often, but ever since he’d found Su-Mai, he’d begun to feel like a real policeman. Now, though, he wondered if having Arieta in his house could get him into trouble, fired even. But he couldn’t throw her back out on to the street, wouldn’t be able to even if he wanted to. Maureen would never allow it.

  ‘Got your warm socks on love?’ Maureen wrapped her dressing gown tightly around her. ‘It’s going to be cold out there. There was a hard frost last night.’

  She wasn’t wrong. It was bitter. He walked fast to keep his feet warm and his toes from going numb. He wished he had someone to talk to but Carly had been called in for a meeting to question her conduct on Christmas Eve. By her own admission she’d shoved a teenager who’d been giving her lip. Sean hadn’t seen the incident, but he imagined the lad was asking for it. Today he’d have to be The Lone Ranger again, walking the mean streets of the estate.

  He checked his watch. Just gone 8 a.m. Nice and quiet. No one about. This lull between Christmas and New Year felt like a truce in the middle of a battle. He took the road up towards the recreation ground and sat down for a breather on a low concrete wall that skirted the corner of the Eagle Mount blocks. A dog was snuffling through ripped bin bags against the wall opposite. It seemed to sense him watching and returned his stare. He whistled to see what it would do, but it ignored him and turned back to the bags. A window opened on the first floor and someone threw a shoe down in the dog’s direction.

  ‘Fuck off, Ruby, you little bastard! Declan, get that bloody dog in, she’s after the turkey bones.’

  Within a minute a door slammed and Declan appeared from the flats. Sean stood up and crossed over.

  ‘Hello there, having a good holiday?’

  ‘S’all right.’ The boy peered up at him. ‘You were the one when we found that lass, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, you did a good job there, son.’

  ‘Yeah? And I’ve found summat else.’

  He didn’t say any more, but concentrated on trying to pull Ruby away from the bin bag. The dog braced her back legs and engaged him in a tug of war.

  ‘Do you want a hand?’

  ‘All right.’

  Sean got hold of the dog’s collar with both hands behind her neck, hoping she wouldn’t be able to bite him at that angle. Together they tugged her towards the back door of the block. As they got close, the dog finally relaxed, and Declan managed to shut her inside. They heard her claws skitter on the concrete stairs.

  ‘She knows where to go. She’ll bark at the door and they’ll let her in, if they feel like it.’ He turned back to Sean, a grin playing across his face. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me?’

  ‘Okay then, what have you found?’ Sean sighed.

  ‘There’s a caravan in the quarry.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Might have been nicked.’

  Sean thought of old Mr Mayhew and how he’d agreed to help him find his missing caravan.

  ‘Go on then, let’s have a look.’

  When Sean was a kid, the quarry was still functioning. The lorries hurtled back and forth along the narrow lane, coating the brambles with a fine yellow dust. It must have closed down eight or nine years ago. Now grasses and thistles punctured the tarmac. A hoar frost made it almost beautiful, if it hadn’t been for the bin bags and the old tires, carpets and fridges piled up in mounds under the hawthorn hedge at either side.

  ‘Not a good day,’ had been the response of the operator when he called it in. She pointed out that half the station was still on holiday, so maybe he should just have a look and then radio back if it looked like the stolen caravan. He looked down at Declan, trying to match his footsteps with a frown of concentration on his small face. The boy’s legs struck out ahead of him like a tin soldier. Chasebridge kids were either overweight or underweight. There was no in between. Declan was one of the skinny type, hard cheekbones and large eyes glowering under a choppy fringe. It was a quiet day; it couldn’t do any harm to give the boy a bit of postive attention. PCSOs were meant to be role models; that’s what the training manual said. The lane climbed past a potato field. Through a broken wooden gate, Sean could see the ring road on the other side. Downhill and around the next bend was the entrance to the quarry itself. The gate there was a sturdy, five-bar metal construction with a large chain and padlock. Sean was wondering whether to climb or vault over it, when Declan tugged at his sleeve.

  ‘This way. There’s a guard dog through there.’

  He steered Sean off the lane to the right and on to a path that snaked steeply up from the base of the quarry and round the side. They ducked under self-seeded sycamores with spindly trunks. The ground was rocky now and the trees hung on with shallow
roots. Sean guessed they must be nearly at the top of the quarry but it was hard to see the edge beneath the undergrowth. He was glad that Declan was in front.

  ‘Careful here,’ he said and gestured to Sean to stay back. The path seemed to crumble away to their left and they were forced to tuck up behind a tree that Sean didn’t dare hold on to for support.

  ‘Nearly there. Look!’

  When Sean looked down, he saw the rock below them falling away in a sheer vertical cliff, punctuated by scrubby plants that had rooted where it didn’t seem possible. At the foot of the cliff was a patch of short trees and bushes surrounding a pool of dark water, from which the back end of a caravan stuck up like an enormous ducktail.

  ‘I need to get a closer look,’ Sean said. He listened hard, but there was no sound other than the wind in the trees and the dull hum of the ring road behind them. ‘Are you sure about the guard dog?’

  ‘There’s a sign,’ Declan said. ‘It’s got a picture of a snarly-toothed German shepherd on it.’

  Sean thought the guard dog was long gone and the sign probably dated back to when the quarry was last in use.

  ‘We’ll be okay. Come on, let’s go.’

  They made their way down to the edge of the quarry yard. Two grafitti-covered buildings buildings stood silently, their windows boarded up. Beyond the yard, nothing disturbed the surface of the water.

  ‘You come up here a lot?’ Sean asked.

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘I used to,’ Sean said, ‘when I was about your age. It was busier then.’

  Declan peered at him, as if he didn’t believe Sean had ever been a kid. Yet there was only ten years between them.

  ‘Got freaked out the last time,’ Declan said.

  ‘By the dog?’

  ‘No. Up there,’ Declan whispered. ‘There was a ghost.’ He pointed up to the edge of the quarry, in the direction of the viewpoint they’d just left. A couple of metres from where they’d been standing a pattern of destruction scarred the low trees and undergrowth from the lip of the quarry to where the caravan had come to rest in the water.

  ‘No such thing as ghosts,’ Sean said. They were walking round the edge of the pool now, its water dark and bottomless.

  ‘There was lights flickering in that caravan. It was parked under the trees up there. Brandon saw it too. He nearly shat himself. I told my brother and he said it were another prozzie in there. But I think it was something else.’

  ‘When was this?’

  The boy shrugged. They’d reached the caravan. Its wheels had caught on the muddy edge of the pool, so only one end was submerged. Sean’s feet slid in the clay at the water’s edge and he wished he was wearing rubber boots, not his uniform black shoes. Through the murky rear window, he could see an orangey coloured fabric.

  ‘Bingo!’ Mr Mayhew’s caravan. Not that it would be much use to him now.

  Declan stood on tiptoes next to him, peering through the plastic window.

  ‘What’s that?’ He was pointing at a shape, slumped in the corner of the bed.

  ‘Shit!’ Sean’s voice carried clearly across the still water, the ‘t’ bouncing back for a split-second from the quarry walls. It was the body of a man.

  It didn’t seem that anyone was in a hurry to get the body out, but finally Lizzie Morrison arrived with a couple of burly looking guys in SOCO uniforms. She greeted Sean with a nod as they all struggled into their white suits. He noticed that she didn’t offer him a smile.

  ‘Okay.’ Lizzie turned to her two colleagues. ‘Let’s have a look inside. I’m not getting frostbite waiting for CID.’

  She and the SOCOs put on waders and gloves, while Sean stood back. Lizzie was clearly following procedure this time. One of the two SOCOs asked him to keep the scene secure. ‘Twenty metres distance and no bystanders please.’

  That meant Declan. He walked with him to the edge of the quarry yard and made him promise not to bring any of his mates back up here to rubber-neck.

  Sean kept a low profile at the station. He wouldn’t have minded a bit of praise, but the general consensus was that it was really bad timing on his part, when everyone had been enjoying a bit of family time over the festive season. A team had to be pulled in from across the region to examine the caravan and every spare corner was being given over to temporary office space. The body of an unknown male had gone to the morgue, to wait for Huggins, the senior pathologist to get back from a family Christmas in Aberdeen. The quarry, the field and the track from the by-pass were all subject to fingertip searches. The proximity of two bodies could be a coincidence, but had to be explored, so the lay-by was being scrutinised again too. Anyone who could be found was brought in to lend a hand. Sean found himself shuffling across the potato field next to Carly.

  ‘Have you been forgiven?’ Sean asked.

  ‘For shoving a little scrote who deserved it?’ she said. ‘We’ll see. I don’t reckon anyone’s going to give me a disciplinary while there’s a panic on. They’ll probably just send me on a course.’

  Blue and white tape marked off the place where the caravan had been, before someone had seen fit to shove it over the edge of the quarry. Sean watched a detective constable following the stony track around the low trees which marked the lip of the quarry, eyes to the ground, until he stopped and stood up straight. He was looking at a black Nissen hut. It wasn’t visible from the lane, or Sean would have noticed it when he walked up with Declan, but he recognised it. When he was a kid they used to hide in there. It was full of hay bales back then, when this field was covered with grazing sheep. Someone had repaired it with a section of new corrugated metal along one side and its steel doors were wide open. The detective constable got out his notebook and started to write.

  When he got back to the station after a two-hour stint, Sean went straight to the Gents. The cold air and two much coffee was playing hell with his system. As he came out, the door of the Ladies opened and he was face to face with Lizzie. She was shaking water off her hands and her face was damp too.

  ‘That’s better!’ Her tone was brisk. ‘I don’t feel like the smell’s attached to me any more.’

  ‘Right.’

  None of the words struggling to form an order in his head seemed like the sort of thing she’d want to hear. He waited for her to fill the silence but she was walking away down the corridor. He didn’t want it to look like he was deliberately following her, but he needed to go in the same direction, so he took out his phone and walked slowly, composing a text to Maureen to say what time he’d be due home. His nan wasn’t likely to pick it up any time soon. She only turned her phone on when it suited her, generally believing it was for emergencies, not day-to-day communication, but it gave him something to do.

  ‘Oh, Sean,’ Lizzie turned and he looked up, his heart lifting in the same moment. ‘Did you know, the file on Su-Mai is definitely going to be re-opened.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Apparently the Chief Superintendent’s spitting feathers about the original investigation. He’s on a skiing holiday in Austria with his family, trying to get a flight back as we speak. I wouldn’t like to be in Burger’s shoes.’

  ‘They wouldn’t fit.’

  ‘Yawn, the old ones are not the best ones.’ But the corner of her mouth definitely twitched. Maybe he’d be forgiven for manhandling her on to the dance floor.

  In the Ops Room, Sandy Schofield was typing up the scene-of-crime notes.

  ‘Something here for you, Sean, love, something on your body, or should I say, your second body.’ Recognition at last, even if it was only from Sandy. ‘They found a phone, did you know that? In the caravan. Says here that the mobile phone has a splintered fascia, as if it had received a heavy blow. Now why would someone want to hit a phone?’

  ‘What if the phone was used to hit the vic?’
>
  ‘There’d be splinters of the phone fascia on the body and it doesn’t say that here. Not visible anyhow. We’ll have to see what comes out in the post mortem.’

  Sean looked over her shoulder at the report. There was an estimate of how long the body had been there. Two to three months.

  ‘That all they’ve got?’

  ‘So far, until the post-mortem’s done and all the lab reports come back. No wallet, no driving licence. He was quite well preserved, it says here. The way he was lying kept him in the dry end of the van, out of the water. And there’s this bit in the notes, just about to type it in; they’ve been on to the phone company, last call made to the phone at 10 am, November 5th, from a landline with a North Lincolnshire STD code.’

  Sean had a hunch that the fifth of November was the last known sighting of Mrs Friedman’s brother, who came from North Lincolnshire. It was also the day Donald was supposed to visit the catering trailer, to dust for prints, but he was a day late and found it vanished. Was it a coincidence? Maybe if Burger hadn’t been so quick to write off Su-Mai, this second death wouldn’t have happened. He only had Declan’s brother’s word for it so far, but he had a feeling that this new caravan was operating the same trade as Su-Mai’s refreshment bar. When he got upstairs to the CID office, he didn’t bother knocking. Barry King looked like he was about to tell him to push off, but Sean didn’t give him the chance.

  ‘I think I can ID this morning’s caravan victim. I’ll bet you he’s called Philip Holroyd and he’s from Moorsby-on-Humber.’

  The detective looked at Sean and shifted his chewing gum from one cheek to the other.

  ‘Nice one, Columbo, that would explain why the mobile phone we found by the body, was registered to a Philip Holroyd of Moorsby on bloody Humber.’

  ‘Oh. You know.’

  ‘Yup.’ Burger looked at his screen. ‘We’ll need to get the grieving loved ones to have a look at him, get a definite ID. I’ve got the landline number linked to the mobile contract. I’ll enjoy telling them what their dirty fucking relative was up to when he met his maker.’