Non-Suspicious

by Ed Church

  ‘The third problem, Tomasz… is that if you fight me, you’ll lose.’

  The bouncer began chewing again. The tempo quickened. Then a smile broke out, turning into a full-blown laugh. He glanced left and right, looking for people to join in.

  ‘Okay, funny man,’ he said at last, stepping to one side. ‘For make me laugh, you can go.’

  Brook shook his head and tutted as confusion spread across the bouncer’s acne-scarred face.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ he said. ‘The first problem, remember? Your bail conditions not to contact your girlfriend over there?’ There seemed little doubt by now that his understanding of the situation was correct. ‘I can’t leave you here. Either you fuck off or I’m arresting you.’

  He showed the way to the exit with an open palm then clapped his hands together at the lack of movement. ‘Come on. Chop chop. No goodbyes tonight, Tomasz.’

  The bouncer’s bully boy confidence evaporated as he seemed to visibly shrink before Brook. He turned to face the door, not quite believing how quickly this had all gone wrong. Then, with a final look back at his battered girlfriend, the alpha male was ushered out of his bar. Through his door. Off his turf.

  ‘Spare me the romantic glances,’ said Brook, tossing his leather jacket after him. ‘And I don’t want you coming back for that.’

  ‘So…’

  Brook held up a forefinger to signal ‘quiet’. Then he tapped the screen on his phone a couple of times and held it to his ear. He scanned the surrounding lampposts for cameras as he pretended to wait for an answer to the non-existent call.

  ‘Hello?’ he said to no-one. ‘Right, I need you to call up Camera 57 on the main screen.’ He waved up at the nearest camera pointing vaguely his way. ‘You got me? Great. Now, see this guy?’ He pointed at Tomasz. ‘Get a good zoom. Bail conditions not to return to this venue. Yep. Domestic. High priority. How many have you got working CCTV tonight? Fifteen? Right, dedicate one to this camera. If he comes back I want two units here to arrest him ASAP. Have you matched him to his custody photo? Yep. That’s him. You’ve got the crime report? Home address? Yeah. Tomasz. That’s right. Check his bail date. Make Camera 57 a fixed camera until then. Thank you.’

  It was all absolute nonsense but the Met could have some amazing resources when you were playing make-believe. He put the phone back in his pocket and turned to the massive bouncer.

  ‘Are you still here?’ he said.

  Tomasz turned wordlessly and trudged away, his leather jacket swinging from one of those massive fists. Brook felt no sympathy. A wave of tiredness suddenly crashed over him. Was getting quietly drunk too much to ask? His phone began ringing in his pocket… Christ… Lucky that hadn’t happened during his ‘conversation’. Jonboy again.

  ‘Hello, mate.’

  ‘Number One! Where are you?’

  ‘Strip bar.’

  ‘Very funny. Listen, I’ve had a fantastic chicken sheesh while looking at this camera that shows the front door of the CCTV office.’

  ‘I’m happy for you.’

  ‘Enough of your sarcasm. I’ve even been comparing the arrivals and departures to our visitors’ logbook.’

  ‘Okay. You have my attention.’

  ‘Only one person came into our building at a time when no-one officially signed in.’

  ‘Have you got a description?’

  ‘Course I have, Number One. Who do you think you’re talking to? Tall, thin white bloke. In his fifties, I’d say. Long, black trench coat and bald as a coot. Proper shiny head. Do you know him?’

  ‘I know him,’ said Brook.

  Now, he thought… Why would the same Homicide DS who steered everyone towards ‘non-suspicious’ in the churchyard be stealing my CCTV?

  Chapter 19

  It felt good to close his own front door behind him. The flat wasn’t much – the only one-bed amongst the fancier pads on the top floor – but a balcony overlooking north London made up for its modest dimensions. Brook threw his burrito wrapper in the bin, grabbed a beer and the TV remote, then slumped onto the sofa.

  As the relaxing commentary of some live baseball washed over him, he found his eyes drifting to a framed photo on the wall – the last trip back to his hometown of Maun. Drinking sundowners at the Okavango River Lodge, the final rays of sunlight hitting the water just right. He could almost hear the hippos and their belly laughs.

  Sure, the trip had been tinged with sadness – his parents packing up for their retirement project of a farmhouse in southern France – but Botswana would always be home. And it had been too long. He vowed once again to rectify that.

  Taking his beer, Brook turned the baseball to mute and walked over to one of the two large items he had insisted on rescuing. A sun-faded, and slightly out of tune, upright piano. On top of it was an equally faded photo of an 8-year-old Brook sitting at the same piano, a decade before moving to England for university (a joint honours degree in ‘Rugby and Beer’ was the old joke).

  Not surprisingly, he had copped some serious stick from his dad for the financial cost of getting the ‘fokken thing’ shipped over. Still, it was only half as much as he’d copped for the other item. That one had needed salvaging from the local scrapyard. It was several storeys beneath him in the underground car park.

  After a decent rendition of Mad World – the title seemed appropriate – Brook stretched the final note with the sustaining pedal until he was sitting in front of the yellowing keys in silence. The piano had always been a good place to get his thoughts in order. A place of patterns, sequences and bum notes that didn’t fit. The anatomy of an investigation.

  He took out his phone and looked at the screenshot from Jonboy, moving his fingertips over the image to make the man in the centre bigger… Yep, there he was. The bald Homicide DS from the churchyard. The only person to enter the CCTV office without signing in at around the time Brook’s disc went missing.

  The chances of an innocent explanation seemed slim. First, there was the cloak-and-dagger subterfuge of not signing in. Then the ‘coincidence’ of those two cameras dying – eliminating both the images of Victor’s last known movements AND the theft of the disc that was their last refuge. Had Jonboy not known about the kebab shop camera, that would have tied up some loose ends very nicely (Brook had no idea how you went about sabotaging a CCTV system, but it was safe to say it had something to do with the dark arts of hacking).

  He remembered Sandy reading out the name from her scene log… ‘DS Chris Beckford’. Maybe he could get in touch with a couple of old acquaintances at Homicide to get the lowdown on this guy? Then again, there was no way of knowing where new loyalties might lie. As for taking the whole thing to a senior officer, the balance of ‘provable’ versus ‘deniable’ was hardly in Brook’s favour. No, chiselling the truth out of this one was down to him.

  He finished the beer and – after all the mental gymnastics – decided on one more before bed. No more thinking about the case, though. Just the final relaxing beer of a long day in front of that soporific baseball commentary. This time he lay down on the sofa. Ten more minutes of this, he told himself. He was fast asleep in thirty seconds.

  Chapter 20

  He said the words out loud just to hear them.

  ‘Detective Constable Brook Deelman.’

  Why was this pest still making a nuisance of himself? He was meant to be ‘a drunk’ with a flatlining career. Not to mention a stupid name. Why wouldn’t he just go away?

  The only consolation was that Deelman’s actions were, as far as possible, being picked up by his police contact and reported back to him. The contact had set up an alert for any mention of Deelman’s name on police systems, as well as having a few other tricks up his sleeve. Which was comforting in one sense. Though it also meant that his own slip-ups – the ones the detective seized upon – were being reported back to him too. Which was not so comforting.

  And now it seemed this Deelman had somehow found him on the pub’s cameras (he did nothing suspicious in that pub
. Nothing!) and three bottles of non-alcoholic lager were winging their way to a laboratory for analysis. So much for his contact’s promise that one of his men would ‘take care of the CCTV’. Even if that were true for the street footage, the detective had clearly discovered the link to the pub and got there first. The ‘drunk’ had been one step ahead.

  What made it even more annoying was that he had actually considered whether to order drinks in a bottle or a glass. So it wasn’t so much an oversight as just a bad decision. The staff had been falling behind with the glass collection. Even ones returned to the bar were being piled up at one end. He didn’t like the thought of something with his prints and DNA on it hanging around for so long, maybe even getting overlooked until the end of the night. Bottles, on the other hand, were being swiftly chucked into some kind of bin at the end of the bar. The staff seemed to enjoy the noise it made. So that’s what he had gone for. The bottles. A mistake, as it turned out.

  The decision to stay away from alcohol… no, he couldn’t regret that. The slightest reduction in his reactions and he would have been stabbed in that churchyard. But allowing himself to be palmed off with some unpopular brand by the barman? Yes, that was on him. And the worst of it was that, for all his connections throughout the police, his contact didn’t currently have anyone in place at the lab. Which meant there was no way of heading this one off at the pass.

  He lay back on the adequate bed in the adequate budget hotel – the place he was tolerating for the only night of his life he ever planned to spend in Sheffield – and permitted himself to consider the worst case scenario. It was more embarrassing than dangerous. On the one hand, he knew his name WAS on that national DNA database. At least the name he used when operating in the UK. It had been there since a bit of an issue with the first job he carried out here a few years ago.

  On the other hand, far from being a liability, having his DNA on the system had actually turned into another part of the safety net that his police contact provided. It effectively created an early warning system, being linked to a Police National Computer entry with explicit instructions for anyone reading it to call his contact. Similar instructions were par for the course – attached to records by detectives in case their suspect got name-checked in another matter. In this instance, however, it was so that any investigation could be nipped in the bud.

  And when your contact’s title was Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, it was amazing the problems he could make disappear.

  So, the worst case scenario? Yes, it was embarrassment. The embarrassment of having to rely on someone else to get him out of a sticky situation. But his confidence in his contact’s ability to do exactly that was absolute. At least until the Deputy Commissioner’s retirement next week. It was why all of this had needed to happen in a hurry. After that, well… he needed to focus on the task at hand.

  Talking of which… he opened his palm and looked again at the three small tablets of MDMA. Ecstasy they called it in this country. Surprisingly easy to obtain. They weren’t for him, of course. No, these were for someone else. The idea had begun to take shape while he was in a dark mood about the ‘panic attack’ and ‘racing pulse’ that the second target was suffering, preventing him from seeing him today. All that pressure on his heart. At his age. Well, anyone would be forgiven for thinking he was… on the brink of a heart attack. It’s amazing how an obstacle can be turned into an opportunity.

  Until hitting upon this method, he had been mulling over a few different ways of accomplishing the job. The way in which he dispatched the first target was not going to be an option in the middle of a care home. But this seemed perfect. After all, his cover story to ‘Debbie’ was that he would be having a nice long chat with the second target about his old army days. And that was bound to involve several cups of tea. The target’s final one might just have an extra kick to it. There should even be a nice little delay for him to bid everyone a cheery farewell and be on his way before all the drama. No-one was going to do toxicology tests on a 93-year-old who had been suffering a racing pulse in the past 24 hours. In all likelihood, one tablet would be plenty. Three was probably, well... ‘overkill’… but there was nothing wrong with that.

  He smiled at his unintended pun.

  And then he carried on smiling because there was no point denying it...

  He was looking forward to killing Harry Wilson.

  Chapter 21

  Thursday, 19th April 1945

  Stalag IV-B, Mühlberg, Germany

  Four days now. Four days since Lance Corporal Victor Watson was summoned to von Eberstein’s hut. He had not been back into camp since. The order from a senior Nazi that he be removed from the squalor and given the sort of treatment befitting an Anglo-Saxon cultural treasure was being strictly adhered to. He should have been ecstatic. But those little voices… the leftover traces of primeval survival instincts… shadowy senses no longer fully understood… They were having a field day.

  Victor was certainly being given plenty of time for his mind to explore the endless theories. Not only had he not been back into camp in the past four days, he had barely left the hut. As well as the main space, dominated by the altar-like mahogany desk, there was a separate room to the rear where he had been told he could sleep. The single bed had a thick palliasse, fresh pillow and warm blanket – a level of comfort superior to the Foundling Hospital, let alone the lice-infested bunk beds of Stalag IV-B.

  If he wanted to shower or use the guards’ toilet block, Victor followed von Eberstein’s instructions – a couple of knocks on the inside of the hut door and then a short wait, until an external bolt slid open and two guards escorted him there and back. Then the bolt slid shut again. And the theories began to clutter his mind.

  Food was delivered by a guard every morning. Black bread, butter, cheese, potted meat and tinned fruit, along with a jug of water and a mug of ersatz coffee. In the evening a sort of meat and vegetable broth was also provided. Victor remembered to save some bread for it after the first time. Not exactly the Ritz, but after the past year and a bit, it may as well have been.

  The old guard who delivered the food obviously felt the same, judging by the way he looked longingly at the tray as he placed it down. Victor recognised him as one of the kinder ones – he had tried his German vocabulary on him a few times in camp and received a genial response. The guard must have been in his sixties, maybe older. Another example of the ‘all hands on deck’ approach as the Third Reich sank along with all of its citizens. On the third day, Victor gave him a tin of fruit.

  When not eating or trying to rationalise the feelings of unease, Victor passed the time by perusing a handful of German books and newspapers on a small table against one of the walls. A German translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytales was the only book he could manage for any length of time, on account of knowing some of the stories already. Thus he had discovered that The Ugly Duckling was ‘Das Hässliche Entlein’ while The Emperor’s New Clothes was ‘Des Kaisers Neue Kleider’. The newspaper articles were generally easier to digest, even if their propaganda wasn’t.

  Von Eberstein had been coming to the hut for a couple of hours each afternoon, insisting that Victor join him at the desk. He seemed keen to talk about all manner of subjects, though the Englishman’s reluctance to fully engage was clearly a growing irritation. Victor also resisted the repeated offers of whisky – a drink to which von Eberstein seemed practically immune – though he did relent on the offer of cigarettes. Nevertheless, he made a point of not ‘mirroring’ or allowing his own actions to be ‘mirrored’ as they smoked. He was aware of the more subtle tricks of interrogation and manipulation.

  Victor was reading his favourite book at the window when he heard the door open. He turned to see von Eberstein entering the hut, his uniform as immaculate as ever and a fresh bottle of whisky in his hand.

  ‘Zwölf Jahre,’ he said with a smile, holding up the bottle. ‘Twelve years, this one. Civilisation is not dead after all.’


  He sat down on his side of the desk and placed the bottle and two clean tumblers on the polished wood. Then he leaned back in the comfortable chair and linked his fingers behind his head.

  ‘Please,’ he said to Victor, nodding at the chair opposite. Victor put down the Hans Christian Andersen stories and joined the sinewy Nazi. There was nothing to be gained by refusing.

  ‘I trust you slept well,’ said von Eberstein.

  ‘It’s a comfortable bed,’ said Victor, not entirely answering the question.

  As always, von Eberstein poured two generous measures of whisky into the tumblers and slid one across the shiny desktop to Victor. The Englishman slid it back. Then the German swirled the liquid round the glass, inhaled deeply and downed it in one. The little routine never changed.

  ‘Have you told the Brigadeführer that he’s made a mistake with my identity and I should be returned to camp?’ asked Victor. It was a theme he returned to on a daily basis. For all the extra food and comfort, he wanted to be in camp with his own people when liberation arrived – be it from the Russians, Americans or British.

  ‘I will refer you to my earlier answers,’ said von Eberstein, moving the newly emptied tumbler to one side and bringing the remaining drink closer. ‘Communications are somewhat sporadic at this stage and, in any case, I suspect the Brigadeführer has more important things to worry about than whether or not you played for his Western Ham United.’

  Over the space of four days, Victor had gradually tired of correcting von Eberstein on the issue of West Ham United.

  ‘It seemed to matter a great deal to him a few days ago,’ he replied.

  ‘Well, I think we can all agree that his intention with this exercise has been achieved. I dare say a copy of his kind-hearted letter is already with his lawyer should he find himself on trial after the war for his… patriotic acts.’

  ‘Sounds like quite the charmer,’ said Victor, trapping a packet of cigarettes just before it slid off the edge of the desk. Von Eberstein sent the box of matches skidding after it. The Englishman lit himself a cigarette before sliding both back. Then the Nazi joined him − two ashtrays already in place from the previous day.