Force Of Habit v5 (8 page)

He hid the car as best he could, clambered over a style and started walking back to town. Each step his feet were sucked into the field up to the ankles.

‘Fucking bitch.’

NINE

‘I’ve never seen so much filth. We’ve been well stitched, bro.’

He was scared. His heart was pounding so fast and so loud he was sure that Casper must hear it, even with all this rain. He took a peak. Casper was in a world of his own, working a spray can. The tag looked good. So did they. They both had hoodies on beneath thick new puffer jackets. Skinny jeans. New trainers on their feet. When Casper glanced over at him he forced a grin. Casper grinned back and he thought it looked as forced as his own but the fact that he looked just as scared didn’t help him any. He was warm in his gear and they had shelter but he was starting to shake. When Casper grabbed his arm he nearly shat in his pants.

It was time.

His friend moved off and it was Casper’s turn to start when he pulled him back.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Blu, you chickenshit?’ he attempted to cover his fear. ‘Don’t bottle on me. You’re a dead man if you bottle on me, you hear? They’ll fucking kill you. I’ll fucking kill you.’

A reply wouldn’t come and Casper punched him on the arm, hard, causing him to wrap his hand round it, massaging the pain.

‘Chickensh-’

The place lit up and they both flattened themselves into the recess. Another police car sped by.

‘See.’

Casper nodded. ‘Good call.’

Casper rubber necked and watched it go. It was dark again. They remained where they were. What the fuck was going down out here tonight? They were in a sea of filth. Another passed by five minutes later. Maybe it was the same one, circling, looking for somebody.

‘Lets go,’ said Casper. For a moment Blu thought Casper was crying off, thank fuck, but after Casper had shouldered his bag he jogged off towards the target. Blu started counting elephants. When he hit the right number he picked up his own bag and moved.

It wasn’t rocket science.

His hand went into the bag and the first brick flew. The sound of glass shattering was deadened by the storm. Not so the alarm that kicked in. His heart did the impossible and upped a beat. He dipped back into the bag, repeating the advice he had been given, over and over in his head: nobody gives a shit about an alarm, they just turn the telly up and curse the bastard who isn’t switching it off. And it ain’t linked to nothing. No one’s going to come running. It’s just a noise.

The noise was scaring the shit out of him.

And Blu didn’t think there would be many watching telly at this hour. They would be getting woken up and coming to look. Calling the feds.

He began to work faster.

He went back into the bag. He set a bottle alight and it sailed through the bottom window producing a burst of heat and light when it exploded inside, the contents spreading across the floor, the flame following it and growing as it found new combustible material.

He lobbed another three and then chucked what was left of his gear into the now roaring fire before having it on his toes.

He met up with Casper in the next street. They had run the best part of a mile, neither looking back, not even once, before they let up and began walking through the rain lashed streets and alleys, not caring how wet they were.

A figure lurched towards them.

‘Got a light?’ Casper asked it.

The man fumbled through his clothing. Produced a bic. The bloke was three sheets to the wind.

‘Here, you shouldn’t be smoking,’ he slurred. ‘And you shouldn’t be up at this time of night, neither, never mind outside on a night like this one.’

‘Keep your syrup on, granddad, you don’t want to be getting too excited, you’ll fill your diapers, you old fart.’ Casper waved the bic at him as they sucked on their tabs and started jogging down the road, laughing, leaving the man swaying in the wind. His own unlit cigarette fell from his lips as they moved.

‘Bloody kids.’

TEN

‘I've been asking around about you, North.’ The Chief had a face like thunder. ‘I've been painting a picture and let me tell you that it's pretty black.’

He’d spent way too much time spouting rhetoric at meetings and cameras, feeling important, that he just didn’t know when to stop. North stared straight ahead. It was still pretty black on the other side of the window too. North admired his own reflection. He’d spammed his hair back and looked the kind of biz the Chief responded to in a crisp, pressed suit and open collar shirt. Every little helped, right?

‘Everyone voiced some concern except your superior in the Met and I would tend to think that he's fucking with me, glad to be shot of you, even if it is only temporarily. Your past record may contradict everything that I’ve seen personally, but let me tell you, Detective Inspector North, that the only record I'm concerned about is your record here and that, that is of some concern to me and don't think for one second that the irony of your recent commendation is not lost on me,’ he finally breathed in new air. Superintendant Egan was sat beside him. They were on the other side of the meeting table in the Chief’s office.

‘You went against orders, you were told to wait for back-up, didn’t, and nearly got yourself killed. You put yourself and others at risk but the general consensus was that it puts us all in a good light when an officer is brave and self-sacrificing, not so good when they are subject to reckless endangerment, so you are honoured before the cream of the community and what do you go and do? You insult them. It all stops now!’ he shouted the final word while slamming the desk.

These guys were all ego. The Chief just loved asserting his authority. North wore the mask. Let him have his moment. Stayed blank, kept calm, processed information. Tried to work out where the Chief was coming from. He could appreciate that he'd had a dig at the ceremony last night, fair enough, but nothing that warranted the volume of heated air coming his way. He had also made a valid point or two. And for the last six weeks he had been shackled to a desk where no one had said jack to him about shit. What concerns? The Chief was on one and it had him talking out his arse. Best let him vent.

‘What on earth goes on in your head?’

Just let him vent.

‘And don't think I don't know about your misspent youth and if there's one thing I know after thirty-five years of policing is that a leopard cannot change its spots.’

North wouldn’t have minded diverting the course of the conversation by embarking upon an evolutionary debate on the subject. The Chief had a point though. North could have been on the other side of the law. The wrong side. Still had connections. Friends. The Chief had been digging deep. Maybe he had been a good cop once but now he was a bad manager.

The Chief placed a couple of newspapers on the table and turned them round for North's benefit. The morning’s local daily, The Journal, lay next to a copy of that middle class mouthpiece, the Daily Mail. Terry Rawlins stared out of the Journal, Denise Lumsden joined him on the front of the Mail. The Mail had all the gory details. Miss Marple hadn’t wasted any time taking up his advice.

‘So, what do we know?’ the Chief said with a knowing look.

‘All we have are questions. It's–’

‘Well you better start providing answers!’ the Chief cut in. ‘Like how this is all over a national tabloid.’

North’s face was blank. He reached for the paper. Skimmed the now familiar story. It blamed a lenient, failing system. Broken Britain. It went on to paint a bleak picture of the estate where Denise Lumsden had lived, a place where pensioners had been abandoned by the state, easy prey for drug addicts looking to feed their habits through burgling and mugging. There was a promise of an exclusive on Miss Marple’s own story, a story that had fallen on deaf ears at the local police station, at the local council offices, her MP, a story to be serialised on the centre pages. She’d done well.

‘She’s a tough old bird. Been complaining about the drugs and consequences down there without anyone listening. Looks like she found a friendly ear at last.’

The Chief Super’s head went red. His chair banged into the wall behind him as he shot out of it.

‘A dead, drug addicted, drug pedalling whore has gotten this entire force all this negative national media attention. How did this happen?’ He was obviously saving up all of his PC for the cameras.

‘I gave her the talk but papers are begging their readers for stories. They have the contact details on every other page and everyone wants to be a celebrity these days, even grannies.’

‘I don’t want any more of your shenanigans. You do not talk to the media. Not ever! Not even a ‘No comment’, do you understand?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And this case is not yours. You are back on light duties forthwith. Someone else will head this one up until DCI Mason is back on his feet.’

‘But –’

‘The only butt in here is the one residing about your shoulders, North. Things were bad enough when we spoke last night but now we also have an innocent victim on life support and a bunch of bullshit stories all over the media. The
national
media!’ he reiterated. He just couldn’t get past it. North felt bad about the car driver, but he couldn’t personally be held to account for that - or much, if any, of the rest of it.

‘But you’d have nothing if I hadn’t gone after Rawlins. What if forensics draws a blank? He'd probably be in a hole in the ground by now and we would never have had a chance of getting hold of him and finding out who did this because its odds on Rawlins didn’t kill Denise Lumsden.’

The Chief sat back down. Looked at the three inch headlines proclaiming he did.

‘Odds on since when?’

‘Since I saw the body. The blood had been making its way south for some time. He was still banged-up.’

The Chief went red again.

‘And yet you lay the blame on the judiciary for letting him out to kill her in front of the whole city last night - including the press.’

‘The local press,’ he distanced himself from the Miss Marple saga. ‘and no one is to know that I was manipulating it to have a pop. All anyone reading that will remember is the judge letting him out, regardless of any later story announcing that he didn't kill her. They've listed what he did to get sent down in the first place and everyone will think he's a right scumbag and that they should have thrown away the key not let him walk free. After all the grief we’ve been getting lately over the gang trouble I took the opportunity to redirect the public's attention.’

‘Until they read the Mail and think we’ve abandoned old ladies in a no go ghetto.’

North decided to move things along. Get the whole newspaper thing behind them.

‘Look, Lumsden was probably killed while Rawlins was still inside. He goes home, finds her and for some reason he does a runner. Initially I’m just thinking he panics. He’s just got out after a year on remand for beating the crap out of her and the last thing he needs is to be found there. He knows he’s going to be first in the frame for it. He wasn’t to know he already had the perfect alibi. I decide to pop into the only place we can connect him to, his local, the Pond House pub, where the manager and clientele are uncooperative, there’s a ‘Welcome Home Terry’ message scrawled across the darts chalkboard and I can feel it in the air - he’s still there. But we need a warrant and so I make the request but it’s going to take some time. Then it all starts to go pear shaped.

‘Mason and James hold the fort and wind up beaten and cuffed five miles away with no perps in sight. Somehow Rawlins’ guardian angel gets away - the chopper playing it too cagey, lack of immediate ground resource because it was just one of several potential sites we were trying to cover - and Rawlins manages to remain nearby, undetected despite a full search of the area by the chopper and its box of tricks. He has it on his toes, managing to cause a car crash with a near fatality in the process.

‘I now believe that Rawlins didn’t run from the maisonette because he believed we would be after him for it. I think he knew what Lumsden was up to with the drugs and he thought that it had got her killed. He contacted someone, they came get him and they were good enough to overpower Mason and James and escape. From what I’ve learned of him that doesn't sound like the kind of mates Rawlins would usually have. It does sound like the kind of people who could run a drug operation large enough for someone like Denise Lumsden to get a twenty grand cut.

‘He ran to them and then ended up running on his own. Nothing they did last night indicates a group of people likely to suddenly cut Rawlins loose after all the trouble they went to. I can’t see them having it on their toes when the helicopter spooked them and leaving Rawlins behind – not alive and able to talk, I can’t. No, it seems likely that something spooked Rawlins and he ran from them. We probably saved his arse, the chopper showing up when it did. Rawlins didn’t kill Denise Lumsden but he’s the key to finding out who did.’

North was dismissed so they could conflab.

Egan hadn’t said a word. He was probably keeping schtum until the Chief had fully vented. When North turned away a smirking face greeted him from the other side of the glass wall.

Scanlan.

He couldn’t contain himself having seen the Chief going apeshit at North. The Chief was an even worse manager than he’d given him credit for if he was handing Scanlan the case.

‘What were you doing there last night?’

‘Looking for low life scum. Why wasn’t I surprised to find you in there?’

‘But you’re on juvy.’

‘Yeah, like being underage stops them going in pubs and the Licensing Act stops pubs like that serving them.’

Scanlan was called into the Chief’s office. He backed into the door so they couldn’t see him put a hand to his forehead and made an ‘L’ at North. North headed back downstairs.

ELEVEN

North flushed another four painkillers with another two cans of red bull while another coffee cooled. Hangovers were lasting longer these days and they made him feel old.