Power and Control

by Robert H Wilde

  Power and Control

  By Robert Wilde

  The Morthern Detectives Book 1

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  One

  It was the glasses that stood out. She was tall and athletic, and she had to be to dance this quickly for so long, moving constantly for hours to music whose bass made drinks rumble over tables. Her eyes weren’t shut, but they weren’t in the room either, open solely to avoid fellow dancers while her mind was in a different world. Her dress didn’t seem out of place, although it was among the most modest in the club, but it was the glasses. This woman so lost in the dance music but wearing round, gold rimmed glasses which looked more deserving of a librarian or a council clerk than a raver. Even when the strobe lights bounced off the edges, even as her head seemed to make its own curious halo, the glasses seemed out of place. A fracture in her persona, a public side and something else.

  She was being watched intently. There were the men, of course, who watched her with their normal facile lust, and the women, with a mixture of scorn and jealousy. One man watched her above all, his hair trimmed short and his face smooth, his skin the colour of the rum and coke he drank, his eyes rarely moving far away from the dancer. When they did roam, they peered into everyone around her. A few of the club’s thirsty men noticed this attention, saw the intense look on his face and shied away from her.

  And then the awful moment, when the music ended and the lights came on and a room full of people lost in release from the world found they had to go back into the night, to their homes and jobs, that their escape was over. The woman with the glasses let her arms drop to her side and annoyance played over her face, at the night being so short. It took a second, but then she looked around, orientated herself, and walked to the man who’d been watching her. Now she was out of breath, and she grinned at him and flicked a thumbs up.

  He, in turn, picked a bottle of water off the table and offered it to her.

  “Thanks,” she replied. “I know you don’t like this, but thanks for coming.”

  “Happy to keep you company,” he said, “besides, if I don’t learn about people how am I ever going to catch them?”

  She gulped down water, looked round, and nodded at him.

  They walked out of the club, both tall, and as she peered down her glasses at the crowd, it was her dress which became out of place and the glasses which perfectly fitted the clinical stare. They walked into the night, putting on jackets which the man had kept under his chair all night and slipped past the scrum of the coatroom, then felt the cold air around them and saw the stars above. As people rushed for the snaking taxis or moved away in clumps, this pair stood and watched.

  The glasses tilted, eyes peered down them and they both stared at one woman. Five foot at most, dyed red hair, no coat but a drinks’ bottle still in her hand, she was walking away on her own, into the night and the darkness, still humming the last song. The glasses tilted again as the head nodded, and this man and woman followed the red head. They saw her turn a corner and they did too, cut down an alley and head out onto a deserted street. The man and woman sped up, gaining metres every few seconds until they were in touching distance of the lone clubber.

  A hand reached out.

  “Excuse me.”

  The redhead turned in surprise and saw the glasses first, then the porcelain skin and the focus of the eyes. Only then did she realise there were two people. The man was looking her up and down.

  “What?”

  Glasses held something up. “I’m Detective Constable Grayling, although I’m off duty so call me Rebecca. This is my friend and colleague D.C. Maruma.”

  “I haven’t taken any drugs!” came the protest.

  “Oh, no, you’re not in trouble. Well you are. You walked off on your own and we noticed a man following behind you. We don’t know if he was after anything, we have no justification for stopping him or anything like that, but Soloman and myself would like to walk you home, if that’s okay?”

  The redhead looked at the ID card being held up and her eyes widened. “You’re really police?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw you in the club, you were dancing?”

  “As I said we’re off duty.”

  Soloman spoke in a slow, crisp voice. “I think she’s surprised police officers go to nightclubs.”

  “Yeah! Hey, look, I’m Susan, Susan Edwards, and yeah thanks. Walk me home and I’ll make you a coffee.”

  “Nice to meet you Susan,” Soloman replied, holding out a hand to shake.

  “And you both. You’re, err, colleagues?”

  “Yes,” Grayling replied. “But I don’t have many friends off the force, so Sol comes with me when I dance, and I go with him to Escape Rooms.”

  Sol let out a small laugh. “But there’s only one new Escape Room every six months and we go dancing once a week.”

  “Deals don’t have to be fair Sol,” Grayling reminded him.

  The three were now walking through the dimly lit streets. Susan opened her mouth to say, ‘a true chivalrous knight would lend her his jacket’, but she felt there was something curious about Soloman and let the comment pass.

  “So, what do you do Susan?” Sol asked.

  “Oh, I’m a journalist. Wait, how do you both feel about journalists?” Neither detective answered, they both laughed. “Oh, right,” Susan gritted her teeth.

  “No, no, nothing bad; hate the game not the player right,” Grayling said, looking at Maruma for confirmation.

  “The press has been hostile towards the Morthern police recently,” he explained. “By recently I mean the whole time we’ve been there.”

  “That can’t be long, you’re both what, in your early thirties?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I’ve only just joined the paper, the Morthern Star; finished uni and all that, looking to make my mark.”

  Grayling grinned. “Well Susan, let’s talk about making your mark; it’s too late to run away now!”

  They laughed.

  The car didn’t pull to a stop, it was more thrown in the vague proximity of the footpath, and the door opened into the road. He only then remembered to turn the headlights off. The man that climbed out into the night had short blonde hair with lots of product and the sort of beard that takes ages to get just right and looks to anyone not familiar with beards as a scruffy mess. He wore a suit once worth a thousand pounds before he’d rumpled it and held a coffee with enough extra shots to keep the end of a very long shift’s tiredness in the box. One advantage of being called to an incident was you didn’t have to rush into danger if you weren’t first, so he tossed the empty cup into the car and just walked towards the house that had a police car and an ambulance parked on the drive.

  As he neared the front door it opened. A uniformed woman nodded hello and asked, “did you want a taxi to take you from your car to the curb?”

  “What, oh…”

  “Just teasing. You’re DC Atkins, right?” she asked.

  “Yes, and you’re…?”

  “PC Koralova.”

  “Yes, sorry, just learning all the names. What have we got here?”

  Koralova ushered Atkins in and closed the front door. They stood in a small hallway, with the internal door closed. The sound of crying could be heard from the next room.

  “The paramedics called us. They’d answered a 999 call about an unresponsive male and found him lying on the floor. He was dead on their arrival and there was no attempt to resuscitate as we’re talking several hours dead. We arrived soon after and pieced a few things together. He’s called Jonathan Stewart, he’s nineteen, Caucasian, and his mother cla
ims she returned home from a day at work to find him hanging from a door.”

  Atkins had taken a notebook out and was scribbling in pen. “Like a hook or the frame?”

  “No, no, look come with me,” Koralova opened the internal door, which revealed the bottom of a staircase and several other closed doors. With the crying now louder and coming from the left, Koralova led Atkins up the stairs. To the right was an open door, with a sheet lying on the ground covering the body that was clearly beneath it.

  “Oh, oh I see…”

  There was a rope tied round the handle of the door, a handle at waist height.

  “Yeah, so the mother claims he was hanging off that. Well, laid so it would strangle him, which it did. Obviously, we need the body looked at, but paramedics assured me someone could kill themselves if they deliberately tied their neck to a door and just let their legs buckle.”

  “That’s… that’s very determined.” Atkins stuffed the notebook into a pocket and pulled out two gloves, which he put on and lifted the sheet. A young male lay underneath, dressed, unshaven, his face the mask of death and an ugly line of bruises round his neck. “Any suicide note?”

  “No.”

  The crying got louder as a door opened below. “Anna?”

  “That’s my colleague,” the PC told Atkins, “the mother is distraught. Do what you need here, and we’ll see if we can get a statement.”

  Koralova disappeared down the stairs and Atkins turned to the room. He rubbed his heavy eyes and tried to dredge up the things to look for. What was it, if in doubt think murder? Establish whether this was the suicide it seemed.

  Atkins stepped into the room over the body and looked at the door. There was surely no way someone could be forcibly tied to a door handle and made to hang a couple of feet, so that looked like a tick in the truth box. A sweep of the room began to reveal details; the football kit of a team from their promotion season, a games console with a pile of discs, a bag from a hardware store lying on the bed, a…

  Hang on. Atkins moved as quickly as the adrenaline surging through his tired body allowed and flicked the bag open with a newly gloved hand. It was empty except for a scrap of paper, which turned out to be a receipt from said hardware store. A receipt for a length of rope. Atkins turned towards the door. Maybe he could get to bed soon. First things first though, he needed to find the boy’s phone.

  Atkins was knocking for a while before the door opened and a man stood there in a pink dressing gown. “It’s my wife’s,” he said.

  “Doesn’t bother me mate, I’m inclusive,” Atkins replied.

  “Right, but who actually are you?”

  “Detective Constable Paul Atkins, and I’d like to look at your CCTV from,” he looked at the receipt which was now secured inside an evidence bag, “from 1.10 pm.”

  “I ain’t done anything wrong.”

  “Nothing to do with you, honestly.”

  A few minutes later and Atkins was watching a small TV screen as images flicked past. “There,” he said to himself as someone walked in. A tall Caucasian male with the triangular build of a weight lifter, Jonathan Stewart could be seen walking around the shop, in evident distress, before he picked up a bundle of rope, pulled it as if to test, then went to the counter, paid for it in cash, and went back out to a car.

  Atkins switched to another camera. A car with just Stewart in it, who drove off.

  “That helpful?” the shop owner asked.

  “Very, but I’ll need a copy. Not to bore you with detail, but I have a death which screams self-inflicted, a phone filled with texts of goodbye and video of the rope being bought. I think we can say this is a suicide and all go home for a kip.”

  Susan cracked her knuckles together. She was sat in her car, a small Fiat although she wasn’t sure if there was such a thing as a large Fiat and swallowed hard. She had always wanted to be a journalist, and now she worked on a small Morthern newspaper which had an agenda larger than a continent. Stomach sufficiently knotted she got out, locked the door and marched inside for the morning meeting which was being held shortly after sunrise for no reason other than the editor thought it was a good idea.

  The newspaper’s offices had a large central room where everyone met and there was most definitely no round table. As she crept in the door and took her seat, she looked at the room. The editor sat at one of the narrow ends, corpulent and unbothered by writing, his secretary next to him ready to note anything and everything down. The editor was flanked at either end on the long sides by the senior writers and everyone moved back down in seniority until they came to her, a junior writer who’d just started and was trying to get promoted above her current tasks of coffee runs, target for patronisation and missing dog stories.

  There were a lot of missing dogs.

  The editor didn’t bother to stand up, an approach he took throughout life; instead he just boomed “is everybody having a good morning.” No one dared say no, nor was there actually a gap left in which anyone could reply. “Has the story been finished?”

  With his face a mass of red blotches, a man in his fifties who spent far too much time schmoozing sources, looked at a note pad. “I regret to inform you that I do not have a strong enough story to print at this time.”

  If looks could kill, the editor just bombed his reporter from orbit. “Your sole job these last three months has been to report on what the mayor has been up to.”

  “I have a long list of dirty laundry but nothing I can get past a court libel case. As much as you want to target the mayor, none of us want to be sued into penury.”

  Susan sat watching, nodding. The reporter might be a drunk, but he wasn’t a fool and he knew the way to get into the editor’s head. Money, money would do it.

  “Keep working then. Maybe I should send someone else. I suspect the junior could do a better job.”

  Susan clenched her knuckles together so much they nearly popped and managed to keep a neutral face as all the office turned and looked. What she needed was some way of earning their respect. If all they were giving her was missing pets and mochas she’d get nowhere. What she needed was a way of engaging the editor and making some money.

  Sometimes, people do things without thinking. A few seconds pass between one moment of self-realisation and the next, at which point they discover they just promised or said something major. Suddenly, Susan realised she’d made a suggestion.

  The editor looked at her as one might regard a McDonalds drive thru server who just asked if you wanted to super-size. “Can you make that happen?”

  “Err… yes, of course.”

  “No, you can’t. But… if you can… maybe we’ll do it. It will depend entirely on what your first story is. If it’s good… of course.”

  Susan should have felt happy, but she felt abject panic.

  DCI Gregory Wick sat in his car calmly smoking the last cigarette he would allow himself until he’d finished his shift. While he would never, ever admit to this, one of the very few bonuses of being widowed was being able to smoke again, and it’s the little things that help you through loss. But with the cigarette coming to end he got out, ground the butt into the floor with a shined shoe and walked into Morthern’s police headquarters. He made sure to say hello by name to everyone he passed as he checked in and went to his office, where he deposited his bag and jacket, checked he looked suitably smart and went into the meeting room.

  He had a regular spot in the meeting room, not because he wanted to be at the narrow end of the large table, but because the room’s big screen was behind him and that was where you could point to things. He settled in and set a laptop before him, his custom spreadsheet listing everything to be discussed, and set a notebook and pencil on the table. He felt it was rude to type during the meeting, but also felt he had to take his own notes. Never let someone else take your notes. With that done he waited, and at the allotted hour the room filled with detectives of all ranks. There was no set place to sit, no hierarchy for people to follow when it came
to this room, but everyone had their favourite places. Comfort was king. That said, the DCI liked the office manager to sit near because they spent so long together working through everything, and not because the DCI could just rest a hand on his arm to quiet him when he got carried away.

  Notebooks, folders full of papers, and laptops were set up. DCI Wick stood. “Good morning everyone, I hope we all rested last night.” A pause in which someone always felt they had to say ‘yes’, at which point the DCI made a fatherly nod and continued. “Good. So, let’s take a look at the cases we have ongoing and where we are.” He liked to team build, get everyone together, share what was happening. He liked a supportive team. “D.I. Sharma, how are you getting on?”

  Sharma, a broad-shouldered woman of Indian descent in a suit which needed no padding, tapped a pen on the table. “We have the suspect in custody and have interviewed him. While we don’t have a confession, we have a considerable quantity of evidence, some of which he’s nakedly lied about, and we can prove it. I have sent a file to the CPS and we await their decision on whether they will prosecute. We have,” a look at a watch, “six hours left before we have to release him from custody. Given that’s six hours of daylight, we should hear.”

  “Good, good,” the DCI said, making notes. “Now, I can’t help but feel DC Grayling has been looking agitated.”

  His gaze, and the rest of the room, turned. DC Grayling was sat next to DC Maruma, where they were taking it in turns to write on the same A4 notepad. Both were in different clothes from the night before, department store suits. “Me, err…” Grayling tried to force a smile but ended up simply exposing her teeth. “actually…”

  “Go on?”

  “I am obliged to tell you about a member of the public who contacted me. They are a journalist for the local rag, a new arrival, and they have asked if they can shadow me to produce some stories about how we work.”

  As the room began to sneer in disgust, Wick replied. “Why did they select you?”