Love Sex Work Murder

by Neal Bircher

  Wilson and Ferriby climbed two half-flights of stairs to the first floor landing, where flat 2 had a similarly grubby door to flat 1, but rather than felt tip was designated by a black plastic “2”, half of whose tail was missing. Ferriby knocked on the door three times, quite hard, and then they both listened. There was no sound from inside the flat, but a door did open and close on the landing above, and then some very soft footsteps began shuffling slowly down the stairs. The two policemen turned to await the arrival of the footsteps’ owner. In time an elderly black woman appeared. She was short and overweight, and was wearing slippers and what looked like a dressing gown. She did a poor job of acting surprised to see them.

  Wilson switched on his charming nice policeman mode. “Good afternoon, madam; DI Wilson and DS Ferriby, Hanforth CID. I’m sorry to bother you, but would you know the lady who lives in this flat at all?”

  She spoke in a strong Jamaican accent, and she spoke slowly. It seemed that she didn’t really know the lady in the flat, but did speak to her occasionally; more importantly, she hadn’t seen the lady for about three weeks.

  “Thank you very much, madam.”

  Wilson turned back to Ferriby, who was looking at him questioningly, even though he knew what his instruction would be. Wilson nodded towards Sandy’s door. They were acting on the request of a concerned neighbour; no warrant needed here!

  Ferriby gave a wry smile to his boss, took just one step back and then launched his fourteen stone mass at the wooden door, left shoulder first. The door gave up without a fight, flying right open at first attempt. Bouncing off a door stop at the other end, it then shut itself again, or at least it shut itself as far as Wilson’s gloved hand that he had put out to cushion it. The two men were now staring only at the door, but for one second they had both seen inside Sandy’s flat, and they had both seen that Sandy was sitting on the sofa. And their senses of both sight and smell had told them that she had been dead for a long time.

  10. Concluding

  The End

  Nick stared into his beer the way that people do in bars in films when they have problems in their love lives to think about. The Ram was a bit of a dive, but marginally less so than the Star, which was the other pub that he went to on his own from time to time. The Ram was good for watching live football on its big (and rather battered) screen, and that was what he was doing there. He sometimes visited with Gail for a quick drink too.

  And it was Gail that he was thinking about in his bloke-alone-in-a-film-bar kind of way. It was soon going to be two years. Two years … a long time for an illicit fling, certainly a lot longer than any he’d had before! He smiled as he thought back over some of his and Gail’s encounters. He glanced out of the window across to Norling common, the scene of some of them. The far side of the common was bordered by the canal, location of still more of their liaisons, and a little way beyond that lay Meadow Park. The smile turned almost to a laugh at the image of his favourite time of all, not so long before – naked in the rain there against a big oak tree. The two years had certainly been a lot of fun. And therein lay the problem: it had been a lot of fun. It still was sometimes – usually even – but sometimes it wasn’t. Affairs were supposed to be exciting and carefree. Two-year affairs got into conversations about where the relationship was going, and what if the two parties had both been single. He hated when they had those conversations, he wanted to shout at her, “But you’re not single, you’ve got a bloody husband, for God’s sake!”

  He would come away from those occasions realising that it had to stop, although Gail was always keen to continue. He’d first broached the subject of ending things very early on. Gail was giving him a lift from a pub gathering of work colleagues, and he’d had a few to drink. He’d asked her how soon she thought they should stop seeing one another – it was after all only a fling, and it wasn’t she who had made the initial moves. The pause before Gail’s response was long enough to become their first awkward silence. It was accompanied by vigorous gear-changing and a watery-eyed forward stare, and Nick’s beer-dulled senses were still sharp enough to tell him it was time for a change of subject. Maybe he should have brought things to a close right back then, but at the time it had – quite correctly, as it happened – seemed that there was more to be had from the relationship … more fun. He smiled once again, because fun really had been so much part of it. Gail was a fun person to be with, a fun person to have sex with … and a fun person to be in love with.

  But fun was not heavy conversations, it was not tears … it was not jealousy of every other female he ever spoke to. If there was one thing that really annoyed Nick about Gail, it was that. Almost from the start she had been prickly whenever she and he were around other women, and however many times he told her that she had nothing to worry about – other than pushing him away through silly jealousy – it didn’t get any better. In fact it was probably getting worse. It annoyed him because it got in the way of his friendships with female work colleagues; it annoyed him because it stressed him when Gail was upset. And he tried to tell her that it annoyed him because he really wasn’t interested in flirting with other girls, but Gail was too astute to buy that one. The other woman that she was most irked by him talking to was Annette – not without reason – and she could be quite embarrassing on that score, with her barging in on conversations, or suddenly announcing that she was going home early, knowing that that would always lead to Nick either leaving with her or persuading her to stay.

  Nick was getting annoyed as he stared hard at his beer now. Yes, it would have to come to a stop soon; it wasn’t fair on Gail to prolong things now that the fun side was being caught up by the relationship drag stuff. And of course, there was the continuing risk of them being “caught” – especially by Gail’s, apparently large, husband. He drank about a third of his pint and placed the glass firmly back on the table. Yes, she would have to go. He would talk to her about it … sometime in the next month or so.

  Eastenders was on the TV, and Gail was watching it with Catherine, relieved that Ben had gone to sleep. Catherine was talking chirpily – as she tended to when the TV was on, mostly making comments about unpleasant characters or silly plots. Gail just kept looking at the screen, appearing to be absorbed. She wasn’t though, she was pondering her own life, and silently bemoaning how its twists and turns seemed as varied and implausible, but most of all, as miserable, as any contrived soap opera plot. She felt like she always did: nervy, and with a real physical hurt in her stomach. It was like being in love. It was being in love, but in love with the wrong person. Was that how these characters on the TV were supposed to feel in their “love triangles”? If it was then it wasn’t usually acted very well. Whenever she wasn’t actively doing something to take her mind off things she always felt this way. It was as if she was permanently unhappy … except of course when she was with Nick. But even then it was sometimes so painful. If only they could ever be together properly. She smiled as she imagined it: she would never want to get out of bed! But the smile soon faded, as she knew that things would have to change sometime, as she had done right from the start.

  “Just whatis shewearing?” commented Catherine, and Gail smiled unconsciously. It was time she took a stand, time to take control; time to sort her life out. She thought through a few ideas in her head but didn’t take long to determine what her new direction would be. She devised a plan, and it was a good one; it made her smile yet again, a big and lasting smile this time, and it was accompanied by steely determination in her eyes. And then she closed her eyes and pictured putting the plan into practice. From now on she wouldn’t be going for romantic meals with Nick, nor for quick drinks in the local, nor walks around the park. No, from now on she had a new focus: sex! Sex whenever, wherever, and however Nick wanted it: sex so good that he would come back for more and more and more, and the more he wanted the more he would get. She couldn’t wait to put her plan into action.

  Retiring

  The case against Michael Kelly ha
d been stacking up. DI Wilson had had no option but to release him on bail once he’d been questioned, due to a lack of any real evidence against him. And because his strong alibi was corroborated by the building society’s CCTV footage, there had been no case for a quick re-arrest. But things had changed on several fronts in the succeeding weeks. First of all, a ballistics examination had revealed that the gun that was found in the duck pond in Barrow Hall Park was indeed the weapon that had killed Barry Timson. That in itself did not suggest a link with Michael Kelly, but then there was the knife that was found with the gun. Michael Kelly had been known to carry knives in the past, and none was found at his flat or on his person when he was questioned. So, had he thrown his only knife into that pond? That was a tenuous one, but when combined with other information, it helped to move him closer to the frame. That other information included such facts as that not only had he once worked in the minicab office behind the Haystack, but he was also said to be “seeing” Judy Hopkins, the controller who worked there now, and who was on duty on the night of Barry Timson’s murder. Hence the statements that he hadn’t taken a cab to the kebab shop that night had been made either by ex-colleagues, or by his current lover. There was also his own already difficult-to-believe insistence that he couldn’t afford the cab journey to the kebab shop (even though he took a cab from there to his home), which lost any of its limited credibility as he quite likely didn’t have to pay for his rides with the firm anyway.

  So there was the knife, the weakening of his alibi, and of course there was more. Because Wilson was hearing plenty about Michael Kelly’s nightly drunken bragging on the pub circuit. Specifically, what Kelly was apparently saying, to anybody who would care to listen, was that he had killed Barry Timson, often adding that he didn’t care who knew because the stupid pigs didn’t know their arse from their eyeball (his own take on the expression).

  Wilson was as aware as anybody that these “confessions” might well be beer-talking bravado, but on the other hand they could be a double-bluff. He was also aware that whatever the case, Michael Kelly was making the police in general, and him in particular, look more than a bit foolish. So that, combined with all of these little pointers that strengthened the case against Michael Kelly, meant that it was time once more to bring him in for some serious questioning. And that led to the final, and perhaps most significant, piece of the Michael Kelly for chief suspect jigsaw: He couldn’t be brought in for questioning because he had, as Dave Ferriby had so eloquently put it after he and Gary Brooks had paid another visit to Kelly’s Harlesham Road flat, “fucked off back to Ireland”.

  Yes, precisely one week before he was due to report back to Hanforth station – the only condition of his police bail – Michael Kelly had packed a sports holdall, and informed his landlady that he was “going home for a few days”. He had of course neglected to settle his three weeks’ rent arrears before doing so, something that she was at pains to point out multiple times to Ferriby and Brooks.

  A check with the ferry terminals showed that Michael Kelly had indeed travelled on the Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire boat, as an HGV passenger – probably having first hitch-hiked to the Anglesey port, two weeks before Brooks was making the enquiry.

  So Wilson mused that his inquiry had, in addition to failing to make any real progress in more than a month of trying, managed to lose all three of its main suspects whilst they were on police bail. And that’s after the same three had each not divulged enough information to be charged, despite there being circumstantial evidence and motive in each case, and despite none of them making use of the services of a solicitor.

  He’d been so confident of a quick result. This was no professional hit on somebody in the underworld; Barry Timson was a pretty bog-standard upstanding citizen. Whoever had murdered him and whether or not they had pre-planned it, then they would almost certainly have been amateur, and amateur criminals tended to be easy to find. The amateur options in this case seemed to be Nick Hale and Gail Timson, who would have pre-planned the murder, or Michael Kelly (or similar) reacting to a drunken altercation. Either of those options should have been a doddle to prove.

  Every day that the inquiry went on Wilson felt ever more stupid and impotent. It was enough to drive a man to drink, which was why, at gone midnight, and several hours after his wife had gone to bed, he was sitting in his living room, gazing through the patio doors into his garden, accompanied by a two-thirds-full bottle of malt Scotch that he had opened only an hour or so earlier. He took another swig. He was worried about his level of drinking; it had got a lot worse of late. Finding Sandra Ellwood had been a bad moment for him. He was used to tragedy in his job, but this one had got to him. This was a death that he might have been able to prevent; it was also another potential suspect to muddy the waters of the investigation; it was also another potential big clue – but with no actual evidence that proved any use. These things were all very frustrating, but what really got to Wilson was that this time he empathised with Sandy. Seeing her slumped on her sofa with her empty sherry bottles he knew where she was coming from. He understood that her purpose in life had gone. He could see why she did what she did. He cleared his throat, sat up, and snapped out of those thoughts. He was determined to solve this case if it was last thing he did. He took another large swig of Scotch, and peered again out of the window.

  At least the garden was nice; just looking at it was relaxing. He hadn’t done much with it in the five years they had been in the house, just put in a bit of a rockery half-way down the lawn, with a water feature that he would switch on in the summer evenings – on the rare occasions that he was at home to do so. His wife – Hilary – tended to the flowers and chopped and changed them around each year, but the garden’s various bushes and fruit trees had all been there long before the Wilson family’s arrival. He liked it that way: the garden had a maturity that was close to being wild, and he particularly enjoyed that it attracted wildlife. A good variety of garden birds would visit, from everyday breeds like sparrows, blackbirds, and starlings, to the more exotic: jays, woodpeckers … and from time to time even a kingfisher would pay a trip to Wilson’s little pond. His personal favourites were the blue tits, ever busy, adding splashes of pretty colours, and some years graciously making use of one or two of the nesting boxes that he had nailed into his trees for them. His least favourite were of course the flash, thieving Magpies. Animals would drop in too: hedgehogs, squirrels, quite often a fox or two, and even the occasional badger.

  Wilson loved watching any of these guests and would go out of his way to make their lives easier with the help of the nesting boxes, as well as untouched shrubbery, and gifts of food. The house was nice too. It was detached and in a quiet area, with big rooms, and thick pre-war walls. But then big house equalled big debt, and hence big part of a problem. If they had stayed in their old three bed semi, whose mortgage his rise through the ranks had enabled him to pay off some years before, then, from a financial point of view, Wilson could have retired by now. But no, they had had to move here, because she had wanted somewhere bigger and nicer, just in time for both of the boys to go off to universities, each hundreds of miles away. They could still sell up and buy somewhere out in the country of course, away from London house prices … and away from all the other crap that came with the huge over-congested monster of concrete and exhaust smoke that was England’s capital. They could … but she wouldn’t, would she? Fuck it; maybe he would just do it on his own, get away from everything. But he knew that he never would; he knew that it was only the whisky talking. Just then a fox appeared nervously on the rockery, and Wilson watched as it gently nibbled at the scraps that he had earlier put out for the squirrels and birds. The fox took its time. They always did. It amused Wilson how different was the common image of a snarling beast, savaging a farmyard-full of hens, from the scene before him of such a timid creature dining daintily on nuts, berries, and scraps left over from his own table, in this little oasis of leafy suburbia. He allowed himself to smile a
little and relaxed back in his comfy leather chair.

  Wilson fell asleep before the fox had finished its meal, and he awoke, feeling terrible, just after five o’clock in the morning. He took a look at the depleted contents of his whisky bottle, cursed himself, and decided to take a shower to freshen up. He was at his desk at work shortly before six o’clock.

  Shaun Ryan

  It didn’t take Michael Kelly long to immerse himself into Enniskillen life. His first few days were spent mostly in each of three pubs in the town centre during waking hours, and in a cheap B&B, run by a Mrs O’Malley, who was deaf, during sleeping hours and for (late) breakfast. He quickly got to know a lot of drinkers, and through one of them, an aging brickie called Jimmy Norton, was put in touch with a local builder, who might be looking for workers. The builder’s name was Pat McBride, and he was well-known in the town. He had a yard near the middle of Enniskillen from where he ran his business building house extensions, undertaking all manner of housing repairs, and from time to time building an entire new house. Pat McBride had done pretty well for himself over the years. He employed more than twenty men, and the success of his business had enabled him to buy a farm – Willow Farm – a couple of miles out of town, where he lived with his wife and two teenage daughters. He was, according to Jimmy Norton, a hard man, but a fair man. When a smartly dressed Michael Kelly paid a visit to McBride and Company the following morning (late on, once he’d got used to his hangover) he also found Pat McBride to be a large muscular man with an imposing voice and confident air. There was a humour about him though, and a trace of kindness in his eyes. Whether any of this contributed to Pat McBride – or “Mr McBride”, as he was to Michael Kelly – giving him a labouring job, he didn’t know, but he did get the job, and he started the following day.