High-Wired (11 page)

Hal walked over more slowly, tears of gratitude rolling down his cheeks. Olivia moved away slightly, and Hal took Ben’s light brown face in his large dark brown hands. He leaned over and kissed his son’s forehead with a tenderness that belied his size. ‘My son,’ was all he said, repeating it several times before he took his palms from the boy’s cheeks.

DS Groves had had more than enough to distract her mind from her chaotic and catastrophic domestic situation that day, and when she could delay going home no longer, she packed up, put on her fiercest expression of determination, and headed for Home Farm Barn. Things couldn’t be allowed to fall into any pattern other than one of her own devising.

Although her hands shook on the steering wheel as she drove, she found that when she approached the front door, she was icily calm. Fortunately her key still let her in, and she went into the house calling out to Kenneth so that they could talk this situation out. She had phoned her solicitor that afternoon and asked him to start divorce proceedings, and she knew exactly what she wanted, domestically.

Kenneth looked a bit grey about the gills and sheepish without the wine inside him and the bravado of the night before with which it had imbued him, and Gerda looked half triumphant, half scared.

Gathering her courage, like scattered troops, Lauren glared as fiercely as she could and said, ‘Right! This needs sorting, and it needs sorting now. You, Kenneth’ – she pointed at him – ‘are hardly ever here, so I suggest that you move into the granny annexe while you are. That will keep me where I need to be for contacts from work and postage et cetera, and when the children are here, it’s easy access for you.

‘I shall live in the main house. And you’ – she pointed to Gerda – ‘can get out of here. Pack your bags and bugger off. I know you’ll understand that expression because your English is so very good.’

At this point she was interrupted by Kenneth. ‘Gerda’s going nowhere,’ he announced. ‘I’ll bow to your wish to move into the annexe, but Gerda comes with me, and when I go away again she’ll be coming with me too. You haven’t fired her; she simply doesn’t work for you anymore. She and I will be living together.’

‘Well, you’d better not try to get the house or the children,’ said Lauren anxiously. ‘I’ve already spoken to my solicitor and explained the situation to him, asking him to initiate divorce proceedings on the grounds of your infidelity.’

‘That’s fine by me, Lauren, as long as I get access to my children. When we,’ – he indicated Gerda, who had slunk up to his side – ‘have some of our own, however, I may need to seek to have the house sold to be divided equally between us. I shall need a family home for any future children.’

Lauren was speechless with a mixture of disbelief and shock. Had Kenneth really thought this far ahead? Had he been planning for this to happen for a long time already? Fetching the key for the door to the little apartment that lay beyond the walls of the utility room, she handed it to her now estranged husband and marched into the sitting room to read her latest eBook, for she certainly didn’t want to be around when Kenneth and his harlot packed and they moved next door together.

She found her throat was constricted with grief at this sudden turnaround, even though she realised that she didn’t love Kenneth anymore, and Gerda was welcome to him and his animal lusts and lack of empathy. Kenneth loved Kenneth and money, in that order. At least he was assured of always earning plenty of the latter.

Klaxons and alarms were going off, Olivia shouting and screaming, ‘Do something! For God’s sake do something, somebody!’ Hal was paralysed with shock, moaning softly to himself the words of the Lord’s Prayer. White-coated people were rushing hither and thither until the moment when the one in authority asked everyone to stand back from the bed, placed the two paddles on Ben’s chest and shouted, ‘Clear!’, the boy’s body arcing as the current went through him.

Lauren could stand the evening no longer, and took herself out of the house just to get away from the over-loud laughing and giggling that was going on behind the door to the annexe. It was obviously an act put on for her benefit, and she wouldn’t grace them with her presence and discomfort any longer. She’d leave quietly, though, so that they carried on with the strain of their forced gaiety for as long as possible before they realised she’d gone.

She grabbed the weekend holdall she had used so shortly before, and drove off to the Hardys’ cottage, hoping to get news of Ben and offload some of her own troubles at the same time – after all, that was what she’d gone over for the night before.

When she pulled into the narrow driveway, she could see that Olivia and Hal were just getting out of a car and approaching the house, Olivia in floods of tears, Hal’s face pale and stern. Tentatively getting out of her own car, she approached them calling, ‘Is everything all right’ but with a feeling in her stomach that nothing was right at all.

Back at Littleton-on-Sea Police Station, Sergeant Penny Sutcliffe had resumed her usual place on the reception desk after a day’s leave, taking no time at all to make the place her lair again, and removing all signs of her temporary replacement.

She was a married woman with three children, and had spurned any further promotions or offers of plainclothes work to retain the predictability of her shift work. She had no desire or need for unsocial hours without any warning, nor for working all night. There were two other regular shift desk sergeants to take her place when she wasn’t on duty, and they kept their own places for things, without interfering with the working practices of the other.

Having been freed up from the reception desk, Teri Friend joined the group of officers who were putting in a lot of unpaid overtime to find out as much as they could about their two savagely murdered victims. She had been paired with Liam Shuttleworth to execute door-to-door enquiries along the last houses in front of the beach, and also putting up incident signs asking for any witnesses to contact the police if they thought they had seen anything suspicious.

Colin Redwood was searching as rapidly as possible through their computer records looking for anyone who might be involved in the local drugs culture, whether as dealer or client, and Lenny Franklin was in the archives with Monty Fairbanks, doing the same thing with the computer that was Monty’s brain, and his little pieces of card. If they could, between them, they would assemble a suspect list, for this was so obviously to do with drugs, both victims having been full of them, that the answers must lie with this particular slice of the dark underbelly of the town.

Superintendent Devenish had chivvied along the press officer and demanded that he be allowed a radio and television appeal about both deaths, and these had duly been broadcast. He hadn’t given details of the actual murder methods, but had appealed for anyone who had anything suspicious to report, or unexplained, that might be able to further their enquiries – then appealed, somewhat hypocritically, that he would appreciate a blanket veto by the press on reporting the proceedings, in the interests of the ongoing investigations. He wormed his way round a few press questions at the end, then slipped off with all the acumen of an eel in a hurry.

He loved the media limelight, and had fussed like a prospective beauty queen before the mirror in his office before going to record the appeal. Proud as a peacock, vain as a top model, he did not recognise these failings in himself, and had therefore been confused when he saw officers tittering in corners when he made his way to the site of the recording.

Having had his shining hour, he looked into the CID office to make sure there was plenty of activity, being told that two officers were in the archives, then returned to his own office for a further primp and preen. While playing with a stray strand or two that had somehow escaped from his fairly hairless crown, he decided that he’d give the whole bunch of them a rocket tomorrow. It may not have been long since the bodies had been found, but the methods of murder had been so ghastly that he wanted no more such stains on his patch. He would like the whole thing wrapped up fast, his reputation unsullied.

By half past ten, Teri Friend and Liam Shuttleworth were back, having done all they could for the day and those working in the building had already assembled a fairly long list of suspects who were involved in, or on the periphery of, the drugs world, either with a record, or just a caution. The rounding-up and interviews would start the next day. Whoever was responsible for these two deaths needed catching and putting away for a very long time.

All the information and names gathered were put into a new file and left on the inspector’s desk for the next day, provided she was coming in to work. If she failed to show again, they would either have to ask for another senior officer, or DS Groves would have to continue in the role, and she seemed too low a rank to be SIO in such a serious case.

Inside the Hardys’ pretty cottage, three adults let tears roll freely. Olivia had been the first to speak her misery. ‘He seemed to be all right – I mean, he was asleep when we went in this morning, but this afternoon he seemed to be awake and know who we were, and then he just went.

‘The alarms went off, and he just lay there – there was nothing. A crash team came and worked on him, but it took them three shocks to get him back, then they took him off to intensive care. They put him into a coma that they wanted to keep him in for a couple of days, while he was on a ventilator and God knows what else. The doctor thought there must have been something else in that cocktail that he took, and which had attacked his heart as it reached its half-life, whatever that means.

‘All I know is that he’s in the ICU, he’s seriously ill again, and that he’s got to see a psychiatrist in case he tried to take his own life.’

‘I can’t take all this in,’ growled Hal in his deep, rich voice, wiping tears from his eyes with the back of one of his huge hands.

‘And even if they identify what else he took, there’s no telling whether it could have done him permanent harm,’ Olivia wailed in her misery of the unknown. ‘What am I going to do if he’s brain-damaged – or if he dies. I shall die, too, of grief. It must somehow be all our fault. It’s all
my
fault. I should never have gone back to work full-time. I should’ve been home, here for him when he needed me, instead of chasing up the criminal activities of other people’s kids.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, Liv,’ said Hal, putting an arm around her. ‘I retired and I’m here a lot for the time. That obviously hasn’t helped at all. He just made a bad choice.’

‘But we could lose him, and we’ve already lost all that time with him, not being here. You were the same when you taught, always tied up in lesson plans, evaluating students, marking work, and setting work. We hardly ever saw you. Our kids must have dragged themselves up like little orphans.’

Olivia was inconsolable, and Hal knew he had to intervene before she became hysterical. ‘We did our best. We’ve been no different to most parents. We did what we could, when we could, and the best we could according to our circumstances. Some of the best-educated kids, the most supervised, go much further off the rails than this. It’s one teenage over-indulgence in drugs. Don’t get it out of proportion. There’s a reason for this. All we’ve got to do is uncover it and try to put it right.’

‘Hal, what if we lost him? I don’t think I could bear it without him.’

‘He’ll come through it, you’ll see. They’re going to phone from the hospital when they’ve identified whatever other drugs he took, and they said we could go in in the morning to see him and get an update.’

At that particular moment, the telephone jangled, making all three of them jump. Olivia went off to answer it, half in hope that it was news of her darling son, and half in dread that the news would be bad.

They heard her end the call, then dial another number, having a second short conversation before returning to the other two, her eyes momentarily dry, her expression grim.

‘What was it?’ asked Hal hopefully. ‘And who did you ring afterwards?’

‘It was that bloody boy’s junkie mother again. She said she’s also noticed some of her travel sickness tablets have disappeared from the bedroom cabinet, and her son’s owned up to taking them as well. She gave me the name of the active ingredient, and I’ve just called the information to the hospital so that they can get on with treating it. The nurse said she’d have to contact the poisons department in some London hospital to check on its full effects, but don’t ask me which hospital, because it went in one ear and out of the other.’

‘So what’s happening?’

‘She said someone would ring us back as soon as they knew the best treatment for whatever this bloody chemical is – hyoscine, I think she said – and give us an up-to-date prognosis.’

‘They didn’t know about this drug?’

‘Apparently they didn’t test for it because they thought it was such an unlikely ingredient in a cocktail to get high. Don’t ask me – I’m not a bloody nurse. How the hell should I know?’

Hal stomped off to the kitchen and returned with a tray containing three glasses, and a bottle each of red and white wine. Removing a corkscrew from his pocket, he suggested that they drink the white first, and leave the red to breathe for at least five minutes before starting on it as their second course.

‘This makes us no better than Ben, if we drink too much,’ announced Olivia glumly. ‘Alcohol’s a drug as well, a poison that the body has to neutralise.’

‘Do you want a drink or not?’ asked Hal in a disgruntled voice.

‘I’ll have white,’ she replied, all memory of her previous well-intentioned remark already erased from her memory. She needed a drink, and no amount of proselytising would wipe out that need.

‘Would you like white, too?’ Hal asked Lauren.

‘No, I think I’d prefer black,’ she said, then flushed furiously at her Freudian slip. She panicked as she realised it could be deemed to be unforgiveable.

Instead of seeming hurt or reproving, though, Hal suddenly burst into peals of delighted laughter, put down the bottle he was holding, and clutched at his stomach. ‘That’s brought us back down to earth. I presume that’s a red for you then, Lauren?’