Love Sex Work Murder

by Neal Bircher

  He climbed into his Jaguar XJ40 and fired up the engine. He was proud of his Jag; there was so much to love about it. He loved the quality feel and smell of its sumptuous leather interior, he loved the languid power of its big motor, he loved the presence that it had on the road, and really he loved its Britishness. (He always called its colourBritish Racing Green, even though it wasn’t – it was some other dark green.) But more than any of these things he loved how good it made him feel to own it and to drive it. In his own mind at least it afforded him respect – respect that he deserved. You had to be somebody to drive a big Jag. OK, so it had got through a lot of owners and a lot of miles in its nineteen years, and it had only cost him six hundred quid, but who was to know any of that? In any case it still scrubbed up quite well when he paid the Croatian blokes at the car wash to give it the full works. He hadn’t done that for some months though, and the car was looking pretty grubby all over, especially inside where screwed up betting slips festooned the foot wells, and the squashed contents of his ashtray spilled out over lush but grime-ridden carpets.

  He revved the engine gently, lit up a cigarette, eased out slowly onto the road, and then called up the Chinese on his mobile. In no more than a minute he was pulling up on the yellow line outside the bookies. He switched off the engine, but stayed in the Jag to complete his phone call.

  Liam Northcott was a very keen cyclist. He had recently treated himself to a new racing bike: custom built around a super lightweight carbon fibre Specialised S Works frameset, with every component carefully selected and sourced by himself, it had set him back nearly six and a half thousand pounds – ten Alan Timson Jags, plus enough change left over for almost another one. He wasn’t on that one today though, as he was riding his Genesis Equilibrium road bike, bought two years before at the cost of a mere two Jags. He had a race coming up the following week – on the Specialised – and his fitness was at a peak, in preparation. He’d just been for a long hard gym session to help keep it that way, and was returning home at a relatively leisurely twenty miles per hour.

  Alan Timson finished his phone call to the Chinese takeaway and shoved open his car door. The afternoon’s alcohol consumption made him rather clumsier with that movement than he might otherwise have been. The door flew wide open.

  Liam Northcott had given the dusty old Jag a wide berth, but not quite wide enough. The Jag’s big heavy door struck him on the left thigh, with just enough force and surprise to send him crashing onto the road. His gloved hands hit first, then he fell hard on his right side before flipping up into an ungainly half cartwheel, sliding painfully along the tarmac surface and rolling over three or four times before coming to rest lying flat on his back. His bike meanwhile undertook similar acrobatics and ended up some ten yards away from him.

  He lay there for a few moments, winded, and assessing what might be broken. After gingerly wriggling fingers and toes he felt that probably nothing was, but his right shoulder was in a lot of pain and he had aches pretty much all over. His clothing, and especially his gloves, had largely saved his skin too. Although, easing himself into a sitting position, he could see blood seeping through tears in his lycra cycling suit on both of his right limbs. He looked back towards the Jag. Alan Timson was standing next to it, smoking his cigarette and eyeing him with nonchalance. It was an annoying sight.

  “You fucking moron! You could have killed me.”

  Alan Timson ambled over. He stooped down and picked up Liam Northcott by his armpits. Then, with his face close enough to Liam Northcott’s to envelop it in beer fumes and second-hand cigarette smoke, he spat out some words.

  “You were going too fast. There are children playing around here.”

  He then drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke onto Liam Northcott’s nose.

  “And if you call me a moron ever again you’ll be picking bits of that thing… ” he nodded at the prone racing bike “…out of your arse for the rest of your short life”.

  He took a final drag on his cigarette, and added. “Just count yourself lucky that you didn’t damage my Jag.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette on Liam Northcott’s chest, and turned away.

  Liam Northcott winced but had more sense than to argue back.

  Alan Timson walked slowly into the bookies. It was a good day: his winnings totalled a hundred and eighty pounds – only seventy less than he had “invested”. He smiled a big satisfied smile.

  9. Discoveries

  Finding the Gun

  Well over a month of diligent detective work had not given anywhere near the payback that Detective Inspector Wilson had expected. Simms and Ferriby’s trawl through days’ worth of dire quality video recordings from Norling’s dump was a prime example: it had achieved nothing more than to make the two of them look like zombies. It was all very frustrating for Wilson. In fact, more than that, it made him angry – uncharacteristically so. He had thought that there really was a good chance of them finding footage of Nick Hale.

  Wilson felt that had Nick ditched the black jacket then he wouldn’t have risked just putting it in his bin, given that the bin wouldn’t have been collected until the Thursday, more than four days after the murder. As Nick often did go to that dump on Sundays, but had denied having done so on the Sunday of the murder weekend, contradicting his girlfriend, Alyson, who had said that she thought that he probablyhad done, then here could have been a great piece of evidence about to fall into place. But it didn’t.

  Wilson was used to setbacks: they happened in all inquiries. He was also used to being patient and taking a pragmatic, structured, and unemotional approach to his cases – it had brought him a lot of success in the past. But he was struggling, indeed failing, to stay unemotional on this case, as its resolution continued to fail to get any nearer. It had all looked so simple at first as well: a nice easy murder case to add to his list of achievements, maybe even the one to make him feel that he’d done enough with his career to contemplate retirement without feeling that he had too many loose ends to tie up. Yes, it really had seemed quite straightforward, but had become anything but. His two prime suspects – both seemingly compliant normal people – had disappeared, much to his huge embarrassment. Every line of inquiry was drawing a blank, as his boss, 43-year-old Detective Chief Inspector Ian Friston, had been at pains to point out. And to make matters worse – much, much worse – those leeches in the media were taking a disproportionate amount of interest in the case. He didn’t enjoy press attention, or “intrusion” as he preferred to call it, at the best of times, but when things weren’t going to plan he positively hated it. What particularly riled him about the media was their shallowness. If Gail hadn’t been either an attractive woman, or a grandmother, no journalists beyond those working on the Norling Gazette would have been in the least bit interested in the case. And even though Gail did satisfy both of those criteria, the story might still have not gone far if it wasn’t for there being a football interest. “Football club manager, Barry Timson” … they loved to able to work that in, those journalists. And he wasn’t even a football manager: he was a bloke who worked on the railways and did a bit of football stuff as a hobby! But, however frustrating it was to Detective Inspector Ray Wilson, these “angles” meant that even the national tabloids were getting all sanctimonious about his failure to keep a track of key suspects, or indeed make any visible progress so many weeks into a murder investigation. Then there was that bloody Irishman, Michael Kelly. Was he a red herring … or was he the murderer after all? Wilson’s troops were doing their best to find out, but he was still none the wiser. It all positively made his blood boil. Wilson was aware that he was beginning to sound like a grumpy old man. Of course he was: that’s just what he felt like … and with some justification. He switched his thoughts away. The idea that he was past his best, and maybe couldn’t hack it anymore was too painful to explore. No, this was a time for action, not deep thoughts. As the tabloids, and indeed the public, would say “Something has to be done”. Wilson knew
that something had to be done, and so he did something: He got his team together and he shouted at them. He shouted loudly, and specifically he shouted loudly about what he wanted them to do. And it seemed to work, because the next day he received a phone call that would recover some lost ground.

  “Barrow Hall Park?” he barked incredulously to the unfortunate sergeant leading a specialist search team, who had called him with the supposedly good news that his team had found what looked very likely to be Wilson’s murder weapon - an ancient Colt Derringer .22 single shot pistol, apparently. “So why the hell didn’t we find it the first time we searched it, six bloody weeks ago?”

  Wilson did not enjoy the answer to his question. It seemed that the gun was discovered in a duck pond, and although some of Barrow Hall Park had been searched the first time around, the duck pond hadn’t, and it hadn’t because it fell outside a one and a half mile radius from the murder scene, a criterion that he himself had set for that first search. It also didn’t qualify for his second criterion of being on or very near to a direct route from the scene to Nick Hale’s house. Wilson’s anger was growing, and it was directed at three targets: himself for setting such specific criteria, those stupid plods for following his instructions so literally, and the budget constraints that made such a cock-up inevitable. In a rare outward display of frustration he hammered his fist onto his desk, causing its contents to jump in surprise. That wasn’t enough to quell his anger, so he grabbed his empty canteen coffee cup and hurled it hard at the far wall of his shared office, some fifteen feet away. There was, fortunately, nobody else in the room. The cup smashed into a lot of pieces, and it left a star-shaped hollow in the plaster of the wall. Wilson looked around guiltily; he felt childish and embarrassed. It had done the trick though. He took a deep breath and wandered over to the office’s dusty window. He looked out over the roof of the neighbouring magistrates’ court, and across the sprawl of his patch beyond. Hanforth was shrouded in low grey cloud. Wilson pondered just how much his/their/the system’s stupidity had put back his murder inquiry; how much quicker could the gun have brought other pieces of the jigsaw together; how many clues had been washed away by the passing of time and the winter weather; how many potential witnesses’ memories had fogged over just that little bit too much to be useful. He also wondered just how much the press, and the public, and his fellow officers and superiors would make of this latest fucking mess.

  And if that wasn’t enough for him to be thinking about, there was something else, and this was something that was really going to nag at him. At the time of the murder there had been a small group of “travellers” encamped on a car park in a place called Down End in the north of Norling. They had moved on during the Sunday that Barry Timson’s body was discovered. That in itself wasn’t particularly suspicious, as encampments such as theirs were quite common on his patch and they rarely lasted longer than a couple of days – a couple of days accompanied by a frenzied rise in petty local crime, in most cases. No witnesses had said that travellers had been at either of the pubs that Barry Timson had been drinking in on the night of his murder, nor anywhere else nearby. Michael Kelly had insisted that it must be the “fucking pikeys”, and plenty of members of the public who had nothing to do with the case voiced the same opinion, but not anybody whose view Wilson had any reason to value.

  All the same, Down End wasn’t far from Barrow Hall Park, and the park was on a direct line from the murder scene to it. It was certainly cause for worry, and, so much time after the event, any slim chance that Wilson might have had of getting any kind of information out the occupants of all of those caravans and expensive 4x4s had surely vanished altogether.Fucking pikeys!

  Wilson got close to slamming his fist onto another desk, but he managed to refrain, and tried to get things into perspective by doing what he always did when the bad things were getting the better of him: He thought about the good side of the situation. And, if this gun did turn out to be “their” murder weapon then there were indeed some good things to consider. Returning to his seat he took out a notebook and began writing them down: the gun might lead them to its supplier; it might yield forensic clues that could link it to one of the suspects; it might lead to other clues in the vicinity; it would mean no more time (and money) need be spent looking for it … and at that point Wilson’s phone rang. It was the same sergeant who had called him to tell him of the gun find, and this time it was to tell him that the plods had found a knife as well, very close to the gun, which had the appearance of having been in the duck pond for around the same amount of time. By the time he slipped his phone back into his pocket, Wilson had the beginnings of a smile on his face. He had no idea what relevance the knife might have, but it was another clue, another jigsaw piece ready to be put into place, and another item to add to his list of good things. Wilson decided to treat himself to something sweet and fattening to eat, and he headed briskly in its direction of the canteen, picking up a now-lonely saucer from his desktop as he did so.

  Milestone

  The day was a special one in Gail and Nick’s adventure. The trusty partner that was accompanying them every inch of their journey, and that had been present for almost all of the emotional roller-coaster of the previous six weeks, was about to enjoy a significant milestone event. Yes, their silver Toyota Celica was going to clock up its 100,000th recorded mile. Nick had been observing the approaching of this event for some time, and was quite excited by its coming. In the bar the night before he had talked of little else, and Gail, recognising that in their world where – for the time being – no pressures or other events of any significance were apparent, something so normally unimportant could become much more so, and could even be worthy of celebrating. Indeed it might even be fun to do so. It gave them something different to do.

  And so it was that upon leaving their guest house, in a pretty little town called Maloch, at nine thirty in the morning, with 99, 937 miles on the clock, both were intent on making an effort to have a particularly good pub meal at lunch time (by which time the big milestone would surely have passed), on purchasing a bottle of champagne in whatever town or village they settled for the night, and on consuming the same – interspersed with some food, pub booze, and, no doubt, sex – before the day was out. Nick drove, as ever: Given that he preferred to drive than be driven, and Gail preferred vice versa, it was Nick who did 99% of the driving. He pulled out of the guest house’s gravel car park, and headed for the open road. They were going south, guided mainly by sense of direction; they were both in good spirits; and the CD player, manned by Gail, was quickly turned up loud.Bat out of Hellwas the day’s first selection, not for the first time, and both she and Nick joined Meat Loaf in belting out just about every one of Jim Steinman’s carefully crafted double-entendred lyrics. By the timeFor Crying out Loud was given an enthusiastic but slightly hoarse burial more than three quarters of an hour later, those familiar seven long songs had taken them forty miles closer to the target.

  “99, 978”, Nick enthused. “…Be there in less than half an hour.”

  Gail slotted in U2’s 18 Singles, as they hadn’t played it for a couple of weeks, but she elected not to press “play” just yet, preferring for a while to enjoy the scenery with a peaceful non-musical accompaniment. Nick enjoyed the quiet too; he liked a bit of thinking time in the car. This time his mind, no doubt inspired by the music he’d just been listening to, drifted to a Welsh seaside with his brother and parents, about the age of twelve or thirteen. He had a vivid memory of a huge crab in a rock pool. His dad picked it up and his mum took a photo; it was still around in an album somewhere. Cricket on the beach, evening walks across the cliff tops, and drinking lemonade in a pub beer garden, could all have happened yesterday. They were happy memories. He recalled a longing though not to be there, but to be back home with what he missed most: an old Honda C50 motorbike that his dad had used for commuting to work many years before, but which had by then passed into his ownership, and that he would ride round and around t
heir not-particularly-large back lawn for literally hours on end. Life was certainly simpler then, and definitely happy – probably happier. He had no responsibility; there were no girls in his life either – largely down to him attending a boys-only grammar school, and thoughts of the future were ideas unconstrained by practicality or realism. He recalled stress though: there were the butterflies in his stomach at the start of a cross-country race (he ran for the school), and there was the pressure of homework, which he always left until the last minute. So, yes, there was stress to an extent even in his schooldays, but nothing like the misery of the rat-race, and his job at CountrySafe, which somehow managed to be both pressured and yet mind-numbingly tedious at the same time. No, his schooldays were free of that spirit-crushing dullness, and full of optimism. In fact, it occurred to him, it was quite a lot like the life he was having now. He turned his attention back to the road as he slowed for a busy roundabout. Gail had her eyes shut and looked to be almost asleep, so he didn’t consult her for views on what direction to take. Nor did he look at the signs, he just headed wherever felt like a southerly direction, in this case a right turn – the third exit. That exit was a dual carriageway without many cars on it, and Nick enthusiastically accelerated up through the Celica’s gearbox, bringing a blinking Gail out of her semi-slumber. By the time he slotted into fifth gear they were doing nearly eighty miles an hour. But they weren’t for long, because Nick spotted a camera at the side of the road.