by Wes Markin
‘Have you heard anything else?’ Gardner said.
‘No,’ Jake said. ‘Same as you. Topham got the call to come and investigate an assault at Simmonds’ wedding. He didn’t elaborate. Hopefully, it will come to nothing. Perhaps it was just a punch-up with his fiancés’ bitter ex, desperate to derail the wedding?’
Gardner shook her head. ‘Your mind? What the hell goes on in there?’
Jake shrugged. ‘Good question.’ He felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. He stepped to one side. It was one of the officers on Operation Autumn.
‘Sir, I tried contacting DI Gardner, but she’s not answering.’
‘We are at a wedding, Tom, she did the sensible thing and turned it off.’ Unlike me, he thought.
Tom said, ‘I just finished a follow-up interview with one of Susie’s teachers, Mary Stradling. What is it with teachers these days? Always so defensive! She kept thinking I was questioning her ability to look after children—’
‘To the point, please Tom. It’s my day off.’
‘Sorry, sir. She let slip something that Susie had told her in confidence. Susie has been writing letters to her father.’
Marcus Long had claimed his connection to his daughter was long dead.
‘Two years,’ Jake said, ‘Two bloody years. That’s how long he’d said it’d been since they last spoke. Why lie? When your daughter has been bundled into a fucking transit van and no one knows where she is?’
‘Don’t know, sir, you want me to go and visit him now?’
He looked over at Yorke and several of his friends and relatives dancing to Wham!
Shit, Jake thought. What should he do?
What would Mike do?
‘Phone the prison, Tom. I’ll meet you there within the hour.’
He wandered back over to Gardner. The expression on his face spoke volumes.
‘Shit, really, now?’ Gardner said.
‘It was a good idea to switch your phone off, Emma; unfortunately, I left mine on.’
‘Go on.’
‘That bullshit lead we just reported to Mike? It came in. Marcus Long has been in touch with Susie. The bastard lied. I’ll go and talk to him now. But you, Emma, are going nowhere. I was going for at least another pint, so you’ll have to have it now. And you will also have to pacify Sheila. She’s going to be pissed off.’ He could hear his two-year-old son, Frank, starting to cry in the distance. ‘Even more pissed off than usual.’
The priest was still smiling, but not quite as broadly as before.
Maybe he was losing his enthusiasm? Topham thought. Almost an hour of being grilled in a poky hot interview room would do that to their prisoners, even the most strong-willed of candidates. However, this boy was proving impressively resistant and continued to exercise his right to remain silent in the face of rapid-fire questioning.
At this point, the only real thing that they knew for sure was that he wasn’t a priest. They’d had that confirmed via a photograph of him. The Catholic Church was unable to identify him as one of theirs.
The DNA, fingerprints, facial recognition software had all yielded nothing. He wasn’t in the system.
Topham grew impatient. He leaned over to Willows and said, quietly, in her ear, ‘Go and check on Simmonds. Find out if they could reattach his tongue.’
It had been packed in ice and rushed off to the hospital less than a minute after it had slipped from Topham’s palm. He looked down at the hand he’d scrubbed raw.
After Willows had left the room, Topham rose to his feet and wandered to the side of the room.
From the wall, he observed the fake priest. He looked far too smooth. He’d glued his hair into a tight side-parting. His face was pale, clean-shaven and unblemished. All the time, he stared ahead, occasionally blinking, but always maintaining a contented expression. Every now and again, he paused to scratch the inside of his forearm.
‘Something bite you?’ Topham said.
No response.
‘Well, it is the time of year for it. Midges and tics and whatnot,’ Topham continued. ‘We found the priest you know? An old disused toilet at the back of the church. He’s at hospital with a large bump on his head. Was that you by any chance?’
He still didn’t reply.
Topham tried to control his anger over this man’s dogged determination to exercise his right to silence. ‘We will find out who you are, you must know that?’
No movement. Fifty minutes and he was yet to even nod a response.
Topham pressed on. ‘A wedding day? The happiest day of their lives? Someone must have done something to really piss you off.’
Nothing.
Topham looked up at the camera on the ceiling – tracking his, and the young man’s every move. He could see why many of his predecessors, pre-camera days, had stopped a rolling audio tape and succumbed to madness. He could feel this same madness rising through him now. The Shakespearian quotation rolled through his mind again: For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.
‘And how did you do it? Cut such a huge chunk of someone’s tongue out? You must have knocked him unconscious first, surely?’
The boy’s expression remained unaltered.
Topham looked at his watch. Five more minutes, he thought. That is all you have left you bastard.
‘You must be twenty? Twenty-one? A good-looking young man. Your whole life ahead of you, or at least it was … why did you just go and ruin it?’
Topham noticed movement. In his eyes. Ever so slight, but it was certainly there.
‘I don’t know anything about who you are, but why are you not studying? Preparing yourself for life? Chasing girls?’
The young man’s eyes moved again. They darted towards Topham and back again. All in less than a second. The grin seemed to be fading too.
Topham felt his anger shift to excitement, retook his seat, stared at him and said, ‘Yes, you are handsome. I really struggled at your age. I had bad skin and I was overweight.’
The young man’s eyes widened. A bolt of adrenaline ricocheted through Topham. ‘You’ve been called that before, haven’t you? Handsome?’
The boy’s grin fell away. He looked at Topham and—
There was a knock at the door. The young man flinched and looked away.
Shit, Topham thought, I almost had him!
Topham saw it was Willows at the door, so he went outside to talk to her. She was standing there looking deathly pale. ‘Sir?’
He placed a hand on her shoulder to try and calm her. She gave him the news.
He went back into the interview room, and sat down opposite the young man again. He wondered if he now looked as deathly pale as Willow had looked. He certainly felt it.
The young man was smiling again.
‘There’s nothing for you to be smiling about, young man. You’ve no longer got your whole life ahead of you.’
Their union was as passionate as always, and the aftermath as affectionate. They lay on tangled sheets in their wedding suite.
‘Divisional Surgeon Patricia Yorke,’ he said, running his fingers through her hair.
She looked up at him from where she rested her head on his chest. ‘That’ll take some getting used to…’
‘But it’s better, no?’
Patricia smiled. ‘There’s a ring to it. People will like it, especially now that they know I’m married to a rock and roll star.’
‘Don’t…’
‘Some of those moves, my God, I didn’t know you were that flexible.’
‘I’m not, and tomorrow I will pay.’
‘Speaking of tomorrow … will we be doing this every night during our ten days away?’
‘What? Discussing my dance moves?’
Patricia gripped his side and he writhed underneath her. ‘No, stop it…’
‘And the correct answer is?’
‘Yes … I will make love to you every night!’
‘And morning?’
‘Yes, if you remove your pincer from my s
ide!’
Patricia stopped and slipped free of Yorke. She emerged naked from the bed. Lit by the moonlight breaking in through a net curtain, she looked particularly ravishing, especially with her seven-month-old bump. His first child. Or, technically, his first biological child. He cast a smile over an earlier memory of Ewan chatting to a girl by the dancefloor. After a while, the young couple had sat together, silently, twiddling with their phones for over an hour. Lost together in a social media wilderness. A brave new world.
‘Where are you rushing off too?’ Yorke said.
‘Where do you think?’
‘Well, it’s too late now, we’re already married.’
‘Annulment?’
‘You’re cold!’
‘How do you think I’m able to spend so much of my time hovering over dead people?’
Yorke smiled. ‘Now, you’re taking it too far.’
Patricia waved and disappeared into the toilet.
Yorke reached over for his smart phone. He’d made a pact with himself not to switch it on today for two reasons. He didn’t want to be tempted to look at how Southampton were doing in a pre-season friendly. The second reason was, of course, work. He’d deliberately steered clear of Operation Autumn despite his obvious devastation over the case of a missing girl. Over the last 48 hours he’d offered advice, checked the right people were in the right jobs, but he’d made a conscious effort to keep himself emotionally distant.
Never an easy task, but one he’d managed to accomplish.
This was the most important day of his life, and the next ten days were his. Sorry. His and Patricia’s.
But he needed to check them in for the flight, so he switched his phoned on, silently vowing not to check his emails or the Southampton football result – he would do that on the plane tomorrow…
He’d started to check in when BBC News decided to send him a breaking news notification. His eyes widened.
Patricia emerged from the bathroom.
‘You checking-in?’
Yorke looked up.
‘What’s wrong, Mike?’
He struggled to find the composure to answer the question. Instead, he held his phone out and she came forward to read the notification. She read it out loud. ‘Assaulted Salisbury police officer dies in hospital.’
Her hand flew to her mouth. At that point, Yorke realised that he wouldn’t be going to South Africa tomorrow.
3
MARCUS LONG’S HAIR looked like moss festering on a historic ruin. The prison shirt he wore was stretched tight; hair burst free from between the buttons like weeds breaking through concrete.
It wasn’t unusual for a police officer to feel uncomfortable when visiting a jail; after all, most of the clientele were in residency there as a direct result of their work, but that wasn’t the real reason Jake felt uncomfortable right now.
He felt uncomfortable because the man in front of him had committed, in Jake’s opinion, the most heinous of sins. A crime against a minor.
A guard stood at one side of the poky room, staring longingly at an old fan which was extremely good at producing noise, but not so good at cooling people down.
‘You lied to us,’ Jake said, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.
Opposite him, Long slumped back in his chair; the chains that held him to the table rattled. ‘I don’t know what you mean?’
‘Your daughter, Susie, has been missing for two days. Your daughter.’ Jake stopped there. He felt there was little need for any more emphasis. If that didn’t have an impact on the cold-hearted dickhead, nothing would.
‘I know that. Do you think I’ve slept?’ A large birthmark, connecting his nostrils to his top lip, quivered as he spoke – it presented the appearance that he had a bloody nose.
‘She wrote to you. Her teacher told us. She wrote to you, Marcus, and you decided not to tell us – even though her life could be in danger.’
‘There’s nothing in any of those letters that will help you.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
Clearly agitated, Long turned to look at the guard, probably wondering if he should just ask to leave. Of course, this wasn’t an option. ‘I’m sure. Trust me.’
‘Trust you? You’ve lied once. How can you expect me to trust you again?’
‘Because there’s nothing in those letters about what has happened to her.’
‘What are you hiding? Is this to do with him? With Christian Severance?’
Long lifted his hands and slammed them down on the table. The noise of the chains hitting the wood made Jake flinch. The guard took a step forward. Jake halted him by raising his palm in the air.
‘How many times are you going to ask me that? Why would it have anything to do with him? He’s got his justice. He’s watching me rot in here. That will suit Christian just fine. And anyway, have you not asked him yourselves yet?’
No, Jake thought, because we can’t find him.
‘We need those letters, Marcus.’
Long shrugged. ‘Fine, it’s not like I have any privacy left anyway.’
‘Your concern for your daughter is overwhelming.’
Long rattled the chains again. ‘You have no idea, Detective.’
Wendy, the Management Support Assistant, raised an eyebrow at Yorke as he entered the incident room. He raised one back at her. It was a clear instruction from him not to ask why he’d forsaken his wedding night to shoot straight down to Wiltshire HQ in a taxi. She acknowledged the instruction with a nod and said, ‘It looks like you need a cup of tea, sir.’
‘No,’ Yorke said, watching Topham scribble over the incident room whiteboard in preparation for the briefing, ‘this is a cup-of-coffee situation.’
‘Cafetière or a frothy one from the machine?’
‘Cafetière with two spoons worth.’
She paused to look him up and down.
He looked for a stain on his T-shirt. ‘Have you seen a toothpaste mark or something, Wendy?’
‘No, sir, I’ve just never seen you—’
‘—out of a suit before?’
She nodded.
‘Do I not look good in casual wear?’
‘You’ve never looked better, sir,’ Topham said, turning from the board. ‘You’re wearing it for the airport I assume?’
Yorke knew that a raised eyebrow would not be enough to shut Topham up so he opted to just say it instead, ‘You know why I’m here Mark, Let’s not—’
‘It’s your wedding night!’
‘It was supposed to be Simmonds’ wedding night too.’
‘Sometimes I think you don’t trust us to do a good job, sir,’ Topham said and turned back to the board. Wendy retreated to get the coffee.
Yorke looked up at the black web Topham was spinning with a marker and photos over the whiteboard. I trust you all, Yorke thought, you’re the best people I’ve ever worked with. But—
He thought back to the awkward wedding speeches and his attempt to reclaim his teenage years playing guitar.
This is where I really belong.
While he waited for the team to arrive, Yorke wandered among the wooden desks, letting his fingers brush against them. With surprise, he looked at the dust on his fingertips. These days, it usually sparkled in here. He was immediately nostalgic for past times when incident rooms were mired in grime.
It was late, so only core team members were called away from an evening with their loved ones. DI Emma Gardner was Senior Investigating Officer on Operation Autumn, the investigation into the disappearance of Susie Long, so she was a big miss from the room. Gardner was the most conscientious and driven officer Yorke had ever worked with, and mother to his goddaughter, so he always wanted her close. Jake was also on Operation Autumn and was currently interviewing Susie’s father, Marcus Long, in prison. A man with a history that would probably prove to be tangled up with his only daughter’s disappearance.
Despite these great losses, Yorke had no concerns about the team filing into the room because th
ey all looked devastated. Absolutely devastated.
Not only had DC Ryan Simmonds been one of them, but he’d also been one of the most popular members. He’d been diligent, thoughtful of others, and the centre of most office banter. He’d just lost his life on his wedding day. These officers would venture to the ends of the earth, and then some, to seek justice for Simmonds.
Yorke waited for Jeremy Dawson from HOLMES to set up his laptop so he could document every second of the unfolding drama. Then, he addressed the crowd. ‘There isn’t an easy way to begin this except to say I’m sorry. Sorry for your loss.’
He scanned the glum faces. Some nodded their appreciation for Yorke’s words.
‘Ryan was an excellent officer, and a solid friend to many of us in this room. You can all be sure that we will celebrate his life, thoroughly, just as soon as we attend to one piece of business. Find out what happened today, on what should have been the happiest day of his life. And then we’ll do what we do best, we will get justice.’
DC Luke Parkinson thrust his hand up. ‘Sir, justice? The bastard who did this is in the room next door. So could we not hurry this along?’
This invigorated several slouching officers; they sat upright in their chairs and nodded.
Despite being stunned by Parkinson’s abrasive tone, Yorke tempered his response to it and kept the surprise out of his facial expression. He was dealing with raw emotions here. These were good men. And they were dealing with loss. ‘In a moment, DI Topham, our SIO, will address all of us on the particulars of the case so far. One of those particulars is the unidentified man sitting in this building. Yes, I agree, it looks like we have got our man. CROWN have informed us we have enough to charge. But until he’s identified, and motive established, it is sensible to keep our options open.’
A few officers shook their heads while several others nodded in agreement.
Yorke took a seat under the air-conditioning unit. He welcomed the steady stream of cold air. He was red hot and not just because of the heat wave; he was hot because that was a particularly difficult speech to deliver - even harder than the one earlier to his wedding guests. This was a broken room. It was going to take a hell of a lot to put it back together again. But they could at least make a start by establishing the events of the day.