Beneath the Bleeding (22 page)

Paula pointed at his leg. ‘And neither are you.’

‘I never said I was. The point is, Paula, this needs to be checked out. If I could do it myself, I would. But I can’t. Look at it this way. If I’m wrong, no harm done. But if I’m right, the investigation into Robbie’s death changes completely.’

Paula could feel herself wavering. She had to defend herself against his logic and against the debt she owed him for helping her back to dry land when she was drowning in her own misery and self-pity. ‘It’s easy for you to say, “no harm done”. It’s not your career on the line. I can’t go storming all over some other force’s ground and hope it won’t get back to the chief.’

‘Why should it get back to her? In the first instance, all I’m asking you to do is to talk to people. The local pub, the local dog walkers, Jana Jankowicz. I’m not saying, “Go down the nick in Sheffield and tell them they fucked up, can you see the paperwork on the murder they didn’t recognize.”’

‘Just as well,’ Paula grumbled. ‘Now that would be career suicide.’

‘See? I’m not asking you to do that. Just a few questions, Paula. You have to admit, it’s worth a look.’

And that was where he had her on the hook. She revered Carol Jordan. She knew she was maybe a little bit in love with her boss, But as he had implied, she knew better than anyone that the DCI sometimes got it wrong. Unconsciously, Paula rubbed her wrist. The wounds had long since healed, but there was still a network of fine scars barely visible across the base of her palm and her wrist. ‘It’s pretty thin,’ she said,
trying to find a form of words to show she thought he might have something but which didn’t say flat out that Carol Jordan was wrong.

‘From what Carol tells me, thin is better than what you’ve got.’

Paula moved restlessly round the room. ‘Maybe not. Her and Sam, they’re off to Newcastle on a hot lead. Some stalker of Bindie Blyth’s who took a pop at Robbie outside the team hotel.’

Tony tutted. ‘Waste of time. I told her that when she called to say she wouldn’t be round tonight. When stalkers lose it, they want the world to know what they’re prepared to do for love. It’s John Hinckley trying to assassinate Reagan to make Jodie Foster love him. These are not secret squirrels, they’re shout it from the rooftop guys. Whoever killed Robbie, he wasn’t doing it to impress Bindie.’

‘And when exactly am I supposed to go and do these interviews?’ Paula said, realizing as soon as she’d spoken that she had capitulated.

Tony spread his hands, the picture of bewildered innocence. ‘Tonight? Now you’re off duty.’

‘ am not off duty,’ Paula said, teeth clenched and lips bared. ‘I am not even supposed to be here. I am supposed to be helping Chris deal with the avalanche of emails from the Best Days website so we can go back out tonight to Amatis with a pile of photos to see if we can ID any of them.’

Tony didn’t even flinch. ‘Well, maybe tomorrow, then?’

Paula kicked the end of his bed, hoping it hurt. ‘Stop playing the fool, Tony. You know the way we work. When there’s something big on, we work every
hour God sends. There’s no such thing as overtime on the MIT. We sleep when it’s over.’

Tony shook his head. ‘Great speech, Paula. It might even work on somebody who doesn’t know how this MIT works. You talk a lot about teamwork. You fetishize the concept of a team. But I’ve seen you lot operate at close quarters. You’re like Real Madrid. A bunch of
galacticos
who ride your own hobby horses into the sunset. Sometimes you’re all riding in the same direction and it looks like you’re a team. But that’s more by accident than design.’

Paula stopped in her tracks, shocked to hear Tony speak that way about Carol Jordan’s pride and joy. She didn’t think he had it in him to be so blunt about them. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. It wasn’t even defiance, just an automatic denial.

‘I’m not wrong. Every one of you, you’re desperately trying to prove something. You live the job. And you all want to be the best, so you all go off on your own little missions.’ He sounded angry now. ‘When it works, it’s great. And when it doesn’t…’

‘Don Merrick.’ Paula fought to keep her voice cold and emotionless.

Tony smacked his fist into the mattress. ‘Damn it, Paula, let it go. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘He wanted to show us all that he deserved his promotion. That he deserved to be one of our elite little band.’ Paula looked away. There were some things she still didn’t like Tony to see. ‘You’re right. We are a law unto ourselves.’

‘So help me here.’

He was, she thought, utterly implacable. It made him a great clinician, that refusal to take no for an
answer. But it made him a right pain in the arse sometimes too. She wondered how Carol dealt with it. ‘If I can,’ she said. ‘No promises.’

‘No demands,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important, Paula.’

She nodded, conscript and unwillingly complicit. ‘And if it all comes on top, I am blaming you.’

Tony laughed. ‘Of course you are. After all, if she tries to sack me, I can always evict her.’

Friday teatime on the Al was an experience guaranteed to fray the nerves of the most patient driver. It had been a long time since anyone had accused Sam Evans of patience and Carol Jordan was no better. Like most passengers, she was convinced she could get them there faster than the person behind the wheel. As they approached the Washington services, the traffic slowed to a halt. Lorries, vans and cars formed a frustrated clot of traffic, made worse by the opportunists who kept trying to peel off into another lane that seemed to be moving more quickly. Silver, white and black in the gathering gloom of the late afternoon, they formed a monochrome blot on the landscape. ‘This makes the decision for us,’ Carol said, waving at the wall of vehicles around them.

‘Sorry?’ Sam sounded as if she’d dragged him back reluctantly from a faraway place.

‘Whether to hit him at work or at home. It’s taken so long to get here, there’s no point in considering anything other than home.’ She flipped through the map sheets she’d printed out before they left. ‘We should have brought my car, it’s got GPS,’ she
muttered as she tried to make sense of where they were in relation to where they wanted to be.

It took them the best part of an hour to find Rhys Butler’s address, a red-brick two-up, two-down in the middle of a terrace in one of a dozen identical streets leading down to the Town Moor. The house had an air of depressed dilapidation, as if it were only held up by the sheer willpower of its neighbours on either side. There were no lights visible and no car parked outside. Carol checked her watch. ‘He’s probably on his way home now. Let’s give it half an hour.’

They found a pub a few streets away. Busy and friendly, the atmosphere made up for the length of time since it had last had a makeover. It was packed with three distinct groups–young young men drinking pints of lager and wearing short-sleeved shirts with the tails hanging over their jeans and chinos; older men in sweatshirts and jeans, beanie hats crammed in their back pockets, hands rough from manual labour, drinking pints of bitter and Newcastle Brown Ale; and young women in outfits that would have looked optimistically skimpy in midsummer, their make-up inexpertly applied, necking Bacardi Breezers and vodka shots like they hoped to hell there would be no tomorrow. Everyone who noticed Carol and Sam stared, but not in a hostile way. It felt more like the look a naturalist would give a previously uncatalogued oryx–a bit exotic, but nothing to get too excited about, we’ve seen the likes of this before.

Carol pointed Sam at a table in the far corner and returned with a large vodka and tonic for herself and a mineral water for Sam. He looked at it in disgust. ‘You’re driving,’ she said.

‘So? I could still have had a lager shandy,’ Sam complained.

‘You don’t deserve it.’ Carol took a drink and gave him the hard stare. ‘I had time to think while we were driving up here. You’ve been up to your old tricks, haven’t you?’

His look of injured innocence was so on the money she nearly gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You didn’t dig this up this morning. You got too much too fast. You sneaked a peek when you were searching Robbie’s flat, didn’t you?’ She was guessing, but the shift of his eyes to the side told her she was right.

‘Does it matter?’ he said, stroppy as he could be with his boss. Which wasn’t really very belligerent at all. ‘I didn’t try and keep it to myself. I brought it to you once there was something to go at.’

‘Fair enough. But why wait? Why keep it to yourself at all? The only reason I can see is that you wanted more than just the credit for finding the lead. You wanted to show Stacey up at the same time. Because this was her part of the inquiry. So, her miss. Is that what it was about?’ Carol spoke so softly he had to lean forward to hear her. She thought she saw a blush colour his coffee skin but it could have been the warmth of the pub.

Sam looked away, apparently fascinated by the navel piercing of a woman at the next table. ‘I knew she was over-stretched. I wanted to make sure we didn’t miss anything.’

‘That’s bollocks, Sam. We’ve had inquiries with IT elements five times the size of this, and Stacey’s coped.
Stacey would have caught this. Maybe a day or two later than you, but she would have caught it. You wanted to be the hero and at Stacey’s expense. We’ve been over this ground before.’ Carol shook her head. ‘I don’t want to lose you, Sam. You’re bright and you’re a grafter. But what I need more is to be able to trust everyone in the team to work together. I once saw a cheesy greetings card that said true love wasn’t about gazing into each other’s eyes. It was about standing shoulder to shoulder, facing in the same direction. Well, that’s what being in MIT is supposed to be like too. This is truly your final warning. If I catch you at this kind of thing again, you’ll be reassigned.’ She downed the rest of her drink in one without taking her eyes off him. ‘And now I’ll have a vodka and tonic, please.’

Carol watched him go. The anger was clear in his movements. She hoped there was something beyond the anger, something that would make him pause and consider his future. She wished there was a way of reaching out to him, to explain why she was being so tough on him. But she also knew that he would read it wrong, coming from her.

When he came back with her drink, he’d buried the anger. There was nothing in his demeanour to suggest he was anything other than the dutiful subordinate. ‘I was out of order,’ he said, not looking her in the eye. ‘At school, I was a runner, not a footballer. I never got the hang of it. Know what I mean?’

‘Oddly enough, I do.’ She sipped her drink. The single measure was so weak, it hardly seemed worth the bother. ‘What do you think? Time for another look?’

Ten minutes later, they were back outside Rhys Butler’s house. It was fully dark by now. And still no sign of life. ‘You think we should take a walk round the back?’ Sam said.

‘Why not?’ They walked down the street, almost to the corner. A break in the houses led them into the alley that ran the length of the back yards. Sam counted the houses as they went, stopping at last outside the back of Butler’s home. He tried the handle of the door in the wall and shook his head. Carol put her fingers behind her ear. ‘Did you hear that, Constable?’

Sam smiled. ‘Would that be the scream or the sound of breaking glass?’

‘Probably the scream,’ Carol said, stepping back to let Sam have a clear run at it. To hell with equality when the alternative meant you could escape the aching shoulder. He rammed the door, simultaneously turning the handle. The soft wood around the lock splintered and the door fell open.

The back yard seemed even darker than the alley because of the shadows cast by its high walls. No light came from the house. Carol reached into her bag and took out a rectangle of plasticized cardboard the size of a credit card. She flexed it and a narrow beam of light spread out from it. ‘Nifty,’ Sam said.

‘Christmas stocking.’

‘You’ve obviously got an in with Santa. I got socks.’

Carol moved the light around. The yard was more or less empty. An outside toilet occupied one corner, its door half-open. ‘He’s not been here long enough to accumulate much crap,’ she said. The back of the house had an L-shape, the kitchen jutting out towards
them. Windows from the kitchen and the back room both looked on to the empty yard. Carol crossed to the kitchen window and angled the beam inside.

The kitchen was fitted with the dark wooden units popular in the seventies. It looked untouched since then. Carol could see an electric kettle, a toaster and a breadbin on the worktop opposite. In the sink, she could make out a bowl, a mug and a tumbler. On the draining board, a noodle bowl and a wine glass. Looking over her shoulder, Sam said, ‘Looks like he still hasn’t found Ms Right.’

Looks like home to me.
Carol thought with a pang of recognition. She turned away and did her best to illuminate the other window. It looked as if the walls were a giant collage stretching right round the room.

‘Fuck,’ Sam said. ‘Looks like we hit the mother-lode.’

Before Carol could reply, she heard a noise behind her. The ticking of an idling bike wheel stood out against the steady thrum of traffic noise. She whirled round in time to see a man and a bike silhouetted in the doorway. ‘What the fuck?’ he shouted.

Sam charged, but he was too slow. The door slammed shut in front of him. Carol ran across to help him pull the door open but there wasn’t enough room for them both to gain purchase. ‘You’re too late,’ the voice from the other side yelled. ‘I’ve chained my bike to the door. You won’t be able to get it open. I’m calling the police, you dirty thieving bastards.’

‘We…’ Carol clamped her hand over Sam’s mouth before he could come up with the hackneyed line so beloved of comedy writers.

‘Shut up,’ she hissed. ‘If we tell him who we are
and he’s guilty, he’ll be off into the night and we’ll have a hell of a job trying to find him. Let’s just chill until the local boys get here and sort it out then.’

‘But…’

‘No buts.’

They could hear the faint chirp of mobile phone keys being pressed. ‘Hello, police please…’ This was a nightmare, she thought.