by Adam Maxwell
Roach figured that if he leaned on her she’d get him upstairs. She could pretend… well, she could pretend whatever the fuck she liked had happened to save her arse but right now he had some pretending of his own to do. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, legal but in a town like this sometimes rules had to be bent in order to get results.
For the greater good, you might say.
“You do not have to say anything,” Roach continued. “But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. A frown clouded her brow as she stared at his credentials. This was real. This was happening.
Roach took his handcuffs from his pocket, thankful that he’d bothered to pick them up, and walked behind Miss Morris. He took her left forearm and guided it behind her back, snapping one half of the cuff closed on her wrist. He paused to let her feel the cold of the metal against her skin before continuing. “Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?”
The woman gave a half-hearted twist, as if she might have been thinking of extricating herself, but Roach knew it was just a reaction to an unfamiliar situation rather than an actual escape attempt.
“Yes,” she said, the fight drained out of her. “No. I mean… Do I get a phonecall? I want to call upstairs.”
“I don’t think so, Valerie. Do you mind if I call you Valerie or would you prefer Val?” Roach snapped the other side of the cuffs closed.
She shook her head at nothing in particular. “You can call me Val,” she said, her voice dry and hopeless. “It was just a job.”
Roach was about to launch into a negotiation with the woman, her providing him with the access he needed in exchange for not being arrested, when his attention was drawn by the noise of the revellers in the street suddenly increasing in volume. He twisted his head to see the doors to the outside world sliding open.
In a way he expected his partner to sail through and issue him with a stern rebuke for arresting anyone in the building. In a way that would have been better than what actually greeted him.
Judging by his attire, he was a paramedic. A fellow member of the emergency services and, as such, someone whose testimony would be held in enough esteem to warrant potential career-ending disciplinary action should news of Roach’s little charade ever get back to his superiors. He often mused that his skills at getting the information they required from whoever had it was one of the only reasons they kept him around but even that usefulness would have its limits.
“Paedo is she?” the paramedic said in tones that were far more cheery than they had any right to be.
For a split second this wrong-footed Roach. He anticipated a comment, of course, but this was… unexpected. He turned and gave the medic a half-smile of acknowledgement. “Not quite, no.”
“I hate to be all ‘haven’t you got better things to be doing with your time’ but…” the paramedic gestured at the crowds with one hand and slapped his shaved head with the other in a weird mix of medicinal and vaudevillian. “The circus has come to town and the ringmaster is smashed out of his gourd on the bearded lady’s moonshine.”
Roach shrugged. “Uniform can deal.”
“None of my business anyway. Don’t suppose you’ve got any first aid kits in here,” he said, dropping back into a moderately professional tone before elevating to pub raconteur once more. “We’re running low. Not that there’s anyone with burns out there yet, but these dumb, drunken meat-sacks are so stupid they keep tripping over the fucking kerbs.”
Roach stifled a grin.
“If they’re the future of this great nation I might well move to fucking France,” the paramedic added. “Is it behind the desk there with you?”
He walked around the side of the wide desk. The receptionist responded as if he’d shoved a cattle prod in her ear, rising on to her tiptoes and making a high pitch squawking noise.
“You-you-you c-cannot come back here uninvited!” she spluttered. “No-one else back here. I… There’ll be trouble.” She glanced at Roach. “Not from me, you understand.”
The paramedic stared at her as if she’d just taken a shit on his lunch.
“I’m not a vampire, missus. And anyway I think that’s houses not desks cos—”
“Tell him where you keep the medicine,” said Roach. “Be community minded. It’ll help your case.”
She nodded towards the door behind her desk and with a cheery “Much obliged, ma’am,” the paramedic wandered into the store cupboard.
The moment he heard the door click closed Roach spoke, and spoke fast.
“You have the time he takes to come out of there to decide,” he said. “I’d say less than a minute. If you’re lucky. Understand?”
She nodded, but her face was a mask of silent confusion.
“I need to get upstairs and speak to your boss. And you need to not get arrested. Am I right?” He didn’t wait for her to nod, just ploughed on. “So here’s what I propose: you give me full access to this building for the rest of this evening. You will leave immediately and when you return you will never mention me or any of this ever again. In return I will, for the same amount of time, forget about your involvement in any of the crimes I mentioned and you will have a clean slate. What you choose to do with that slate in the morning is, of course, entirely up to you.”
The two of them turned to the door as they heard the sound of the paramedic dropping something.
“Ten seconds. What’s your answer?” Roach asked.
She nodded.
Roach unlocked and removed the cuffs.
Val reached down to the lanyard that hung around her neck. She slipped a card out from behind her photo ID.
“My card has full access. The lifts, all the doors, all the way up to Mr Croft’s office.”
She pressed the card into his hand. It was completely blank. Could be anything.
“If you’re lying…” Roach let the words hang in the air but he believed her. The way her shoulders hung, the way she rubbed her wrists… it wouldn’t surprise him if she was composing a new CV sitting up in bed tonight.
She shook her head.
“Can I go?” she asked. “Please?”
“Help him,” said Roach, gesturing to the door behind them. “Once he’s gone, you can go too.”
“Are we… done?”
“We’re done,” said Roach and jogged away from her, heading back to his gold reflection in the lifts. “Stay out of trouble.” He swiped the card through the receptacle by the lift. For a second, nothing happened and then the tiny red LED on the card reader turned green and he heard the lift’s mechanism whirr into life. Moments later the doors slid open silently and he stepped inside.
Val Morris breathed out. She wanted to cry but now was not the time for that. She breathed in and rapped on the door behind her desk.
“Mr nurse man?” she said.
The door opened and the paramedic walked out carrying the small, green box that contained the office medical supplies.
He walked into reception, taking in the sudden change of circumstance that had occurred in his absence.
“Did you kill him?” he grinned.
She stared coldly at him. “Do you have everything you need, sir?” The years of bureaucratic blustering came back to her faster than the speed of light.
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “How come you’re not arrested then?”
“I just want to go home, if you don’t m—”
“Come on. You pay him off?” he winked at her. “Or were you two just playing a bit of the old slap and tickle? Master and servant, eh?”
“Certainly not! It was a… a… misunderstanding.” She’d heard somewhere that if you said things with enough conviction eventually you’d believe it yourself.
“I bet it was. Well, thanks for this lot,” he said
Val Morris shoved her belongings into her handbag. Her sister had warned her but she hadn’t listened. She would g
o and stay with her in Crowley for a few weeks. Or months.
The paramedic sauntered towards the door, pulling his mobile from his pocket, a grin plastered across his face.
hes in teh lift. u bettr b reddy I’ll be in position in 5
Barry
eight
Violet glanced at her phone more out of habit than out of purpose. She noticed the red battery symbol in the corner of the screen. It felt like a betrayal. Except that it wasn’t. Not really. The phone was an inanimate object and, as such, lacked the capacity to fall short or aid her. She hadn’t turned the charger on at the wall when she plugged it in. She’d thought half a charge was going to be enough. It would be.
Of course it would be, she thought and slipped it back in her pocket, assured that it would last if she could stop habitually checking the bloody thing.
“We need to hurry up,” she said, with a smile which said urgency was something that happened to other people.
Katie stood next to the discarded pile of firefighter fatigues in a much more subtle, black outfit. One much more befitting a woman about to engage in nefarious criminal undertakings. That was, however, the only thing subtle about her. At six feet ten inches tall, Katie towered over Violet. As if that wasn’t enough Katie trained, and she trained hard, which had given her the muscular build of Bruce Lee. She reached down and ruffled Violet’s hair. Violet twisted out of her grasp and glared up at her.
“It’s time you got to work,” said Violet. She stooped to grab the backpack then brought it up in an arc, throwing it at Katie’s head.
Katie caught it with one hand, then reached inside and plucked out a cordless angle grinder, mask and glasses. Securing the safety equipment on her face, she pulled off the plastic guard and revved it a couple of times. She grabbed the filing cabinet Violet had been hiding behind minutes earlier and flung it to one side as if it was nothing more than a cardboard box. Violet glared at her as it brushed past her leg, coming dangerously close to crushing her foot under its very real weight.
Katie’s smirk was hidden under her mask as she turned her attention to the wall and attacked it with the angle grinder. Just as the glamour and glitz of the ancient building’s facade had stopped outside the public eye, the same level of effort, or lack of it, had been dribbled on the rest of the building. Within moments, she had cut a small door-shaped rectangle in the thin plasterboard. Violet coughed, struggling to find her own mask and eye-protectors from the backpack. When she did finally locate them, she slipped them on and stood, watching Katie.
There was nothing to do but wait. And waiting was boring. Violet rocked backwards and forwards between the heels and the balls of her feet, repeatedly. She looked over to the computer screens. Zoe would be finished covering their tracks by now. Probably. Almost certainly.
She ran through the job timings again in her head. Everything was planned from where she set the first fire to how long it would take them to get through this wall and each subsequent action. She checked her phone. If anything they were ahead of schedule. There was a flicker of mischief amongst the background adrenalin of the job.
The noise stopped abruptly and Violet wondered if that was it. She leaned forward to peer through the gathering dust Katie’s efforts were kicking out. The grinder burst back into life and Violet jumped at the sudden intrusion into the silence.
She looked at the computers again and rummaged in the backpack, mischief now firmly on her mind, but almost as quickly as it had started, it was over. Katie discarded the grinder before reaching forward and riving the plasterboard from where it now barely hung, tossing it neatly over Violet’s head. It crashed into the computer and she winced for a moment, glancing at Violet and perhaps waiting to be told off.
“Easy, Chewie!” Violet grinned under the mask.
Katie made a low guttural growl and, for a moment, Violet backed down, taking a literal step back, but then mischief got the better of her again and she inched forward as Katie turned her attention to the gap she had created. Behind the plasterboard was a dark wall. Katie surveyed it, calculating whatever it was she calculated way up there in the clouds.
Treading ever-so lightly, Violet padded up to her. Standing on tiptoes, she reached up, trying to twang the elastic on the back of her friend’s mask, but it was no good, she couldn’t reach. Silently admitting defeat she touched her friend’s shoulder.
Katie stopped what she was doing and looked around, tensed. Her eyes flashed with irritation but she shook it off, dropping to one knee and reaching out a hand to touch the wall. Violet followed suit. It was made from foam bricks that were dark grey and ridged. Katie nodded to her and the pair of them grabbed handfuls of the foam and pulled at it. It came away in chunks and soon they had cleared enough to see the red bricks of what would have been the original outside wall of the beautiful Victorian building. The same beautiful Victorian building that government funding had been misappropriated to conceal.
Katie picked up the angle grinder once more and set to work on the bricks as Violet ducked back out of the way. In amongst the screams of blade against stone, Violet checked the CCTV one last time before reaching inside her jacket. Finally she found the item she’d been looking to make her mischief with moments earlier. She pulled out an extendable baton and began by smashing the monitors.
Katie stopped what she was doing and looked over her shoulder at Violet.
“What?” Violet asked. “It’s necessary.”
Katie continued to stare.
“You know what? Screw you,” said Violet in mock-petulance. “I know the screens don’t need to be smashed. But it looks good, doesn’t it? Like Elias is covering his tracks. And anyway, I just love those breaking noises. Now get on with your job and I’ll get on with mine.”
The angle grinder howled in protest as it continued its task. It drowned out the sound of Violet smashing the computers and then the hard disks within the computers which held the recordings of the CCTV. A few minutes passed until, finally, Katie was satisfied the hole was large enough. She signalled to Violet, but the air was red, a dust cloud engulfing the office like a localised sand-storm. Squinting into it, she waited, expecting Violet’s temporary boredom to manifest itself in another ridiculous attack. She breathed several clammy breaths through her mask, then waved her hand in front of her. After a little wafting the shape of the desk appeared. Then, as the dust settled on the surfaces of the office, Violet popped up from amongst the broken computers, removing her mask and goggles. She blinked an exaggerated wide-eyed blink of innocence. Katie nodded towards the gap in the wall.
Violet snapped back into serious-mode as quickly as she snapped on her torch. She was back in play and wasted no time examining what was in the void Katie had opened up. She peered through the gap, her torch beam flickering into the darkness beyond. The light caught the masonry dust, appearing to propel it through the hole like a swarm of microscopic moths drawn to her light. “We’re in,” she said.
Katie gave a mock-salute and threw her mask and eye-protectors onto the mangled mess of computers Violet had created. Violet ducked her head, stepping through the space Katie had created out of the Tulip Street Gin Emporium and into the loft space of the building next door.
The smell of the air changed from one building to the next. The masonry, although still there, was replaced with the aroma of damp dust and loft insulation. It reminded Violet of retrieving Christmas decorations from the attic when she was a kid. Katie folded herself through the opening and Violet flashed the torch up at her face before realising she was blinding her and instantly flicking it in another direction.
“Sorry,” she said and walked deeper into the loft space.
Katie made to follow her but there was an enormous crash and Violet whirled around, her heart thumping in her chest. For a moment she feared the worst, when the beam of her torch couldn't immediately locate her accomplice, but the rustling, bashing movement soon revealed where her friend was. She moved the torch beam down and it settled on Katie, who
was lying on her side amongst the insulation.
“Lazy bitch,” said Violet. “We haven’t got time for a nap. Stuff to do. Revenge to wreak. All that jazz.”
Katie’s hand went to cover her mouth as she let out a silent laugh, before standing up and gesturing to the box on the floor she had fallen over. Violet flashed the beam at it. On the side were written the words ‘7ft Mountain Pine’ — it was an actual Christmas tree.
“Seven foot mountain pine.” Violet tried to stifle a laugh. “We might have found a new nickname for you.”
Katie strode forward, deliberately bumping in to Violet before plucking the torch from her hand. A few strides later and she planted her feet wide apart and flicked the direction of the beam directly between them. Violet moved quickly to catch up, dropping to her knees to inspect the small loft hatch Katie was highlighting. Violet’s hands moved to grip the edges of the hatch, but she paused, looking up at her friend. She waited, allowing a silence to engulf them until all that was left was a barely audible ringing in the two women’s ears.
Violet allowed her breathing to slow and moved lower and lower, her face closer and closer to the hatch. She nodded to Katie, who shut off the torch, but before either of their eyes could acclimatise to the dark Violet lifted the corner of the loft hatch. Just a crack. Perhaps a centimetre or two.
They waited. Listening. Watching the light. Looking for movement. Expecting to be discovered.
A minute passed without sound, without activity of any kind. Violet lifted the hatch far enough to get a limited view of the room below. No-one was immediately visible. She leaned forward and Katie partially unzipped the backpack on Violet’s back, her hand moving so slowly she could feel each tooth in the zipper uncouple. She reached inside and, with the same infinite patience, silently rooted around until she found what she was searching for.