High-Wired (24 page)

‘We’ll get him, whoever he is,’ her boss assured her, but without much inner confidence.

Suddenly, the phone on the inspector’s desk shrilled, and she answered, her face immediately taking on a grim expression. She listened for a short while, said, ‘I’ll be right up,’ and ended the call.

‘What’s up?’ asked Lauren, looking concerned.

‘Devilish Devenish wants me upstairs again. When I get back, could you apply the bandages and sticking plasters? I just hope this bollocking doesn’t involve donning a uniform again and going back to walking the beat.’

‘Stick up for yourself. You’ve done nothing wrong, and you can always call me up to support you?’

‘Fat lot of good that would do. I’ll just have to convince him that I’m on the side of the angels.’

Hardy mounted the two flights of stairs slowly, her insides churning at what was to come. Devenish didn’t take any prisoners, and he would not look kindly on what she had done; how she had handled things.

Standing to attention at his desk, she felt her heart in her boots, as he began berating her for her actions on the Lacey case. ‘I gave you a direct order to stand back from the investigation. The next thing I hear is that you have arrested Edwards and Stoner.

‘What on earth did you not understand about standing away from the case; standing down your team and leaving well alone?’ His top lip was curled in a sneer, his brow furrowed with creases of anger.

‘I didn’t disobey a direct order, sir.’

‘That’s a blatant lie,’ he roared.

Gathering her courage in both hands, she continued, ‘I stood my team down as you ordered, sir. I then had some further information from Dr MacArthur, sir. This indicated to me that the abduction, rape, and murder of a minor had nothing to do with drugs, sir.

‘I treated this as a totally separate case, sir, and carried on with my enquiries. I feel that there is enough forensic evidence to put away Edwards and Stoner – and Lord, when he is caught, sir, with respect.’

‘Hardy, although you are
really
trying my patience, I want to know if you have anything else up your sleeve.’

‘No, sir. I was just doing my job as I perceived it, sir.’

‘Inspector, you are obdurate, devious, and uncooperative, but I cannot find fault with your persistence. Though maybe it would be a good thing to rein in this part of your personality in the future.’

Hardy stood silently.

In the void that followed, Devenish continued, ‘I find you insubordinate in the extreme, but I’ve got my eye on you now. If I see you put a foot out of place at any time in the future, I will have your rank, and bust you down to a uniformed constable pounding the beat again. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get back to your duties, but don’t forget that I am watching you very carefully.’

‘No, sir.

When the inspector left his office she found that she was shaking all over, and that there were tears in her eyes – tears of fury. If she’d asked him if he’d like two dangerous murderers left free to roam the streets of Littleton-on-Sea, he would have thrown a hissy fit, saying she was implying that he didn’t police his patch properly, although she knew it would have been true. She had absolute belief that what she had done was right, and that she shouldn’t be criticised for trying to put such dangerous men behind bars.

She had not trespassed on to the drugs aspect of the case. She had merely worked round it, seemingly risking her career for what she perceived as good policing. Damn the superintendent, and his ilk, more concerned with their own skins than the safety of the public whom they were supposed to protect.

She couldn’t seem to get a balance in her life. She felt she had neglected her family, given the way her children had behaved recently but, at the same time, she felt she would have been neglecting her duty had she not acted as she had, with regard to Edwards and Stoner. At the moment she couldn’t seem to do right for doing wrong. Damn them all. She needed someone to talk to, and somewhere else to do the talking.

Back at her desk, as she removed her coat from its hook and put it on, Groves rose and joined her. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘Off to play hooky in the coffee shop. Are you coming? I could do with a sympathetic ear.’

‘You try and stop me,’ replied Lauren, grabbing her own elegant cashmere jacket. ‘I’ve got some good news for you.’

Settled with a coffee and a Danish pastry in front of each of them, Lauren was asked to impart her good news by a sceptical Olivia. ‘There was a call while you were in the dragon’s lair, which I took for you.’

‘About?’

‘The new forensic evidence about the bite marks has cemented things, and the file has gone to the CPS for approval to prosecute, and the men are being held until a magistrate’s appearance in the morning to remand them in custody.’

‘That’s the best news – workwise – that I’ve heard in a long time. Here’s to a successful prosecution,’ said Hardy, holding up her coffee cup. ‘And we can arrange that ID parade we never had for the landlord of the River View.

Two days later, it was reported that Mervyn Lord had been stopped trying to board the Eurostar to Paris. He had been detained and fingerprinted, and was now on his way to the Littleton-on-Sea station for questioning.

This time, he was so rattled that he confessed in the hope that co-operation would shorten his sentence, guessing what was happening when an impression of his bite was taken. In his attempt to throw some of the blame towards his partners in crime, he also let slip that it was Edwards who had torched the detective’s house.

‘He was as high as a kite that night, and I couldn’t do nuthin’ with him. God knows what he’d taken, but he’d had that many lines of coke that you could’ve got high just from his hanky. He said he wanted to “get” one of the coppers who’d been persecuting him, and he knew where one of them lived because one of the filth had squealed. I told him he wasn’t fit to drive, and that he’d better leave well alone, but he got away from me, saying he already had a can of petrol in the boot of his car. I was shit-scared, and decided to leave him to it. I didn’t want to be prosecuted for frying a copper. It was him did it, not anyone else; certainly not me. If you don’t believe me, have a look in his car. I bet he’s still got the bloody thing in there. He’s daft enough not to have got rid of it.’

‘And you didn’t think to phone and warn someone at the station?’ he was asked.

‘What do you think I am, a grass?’ he asked, then reddened, as he realised he was being exactly that at that very moment.

Ten days later, when all three men were awaiting trial at one of Her Majesty’s secure hotels, the town exploded with armed police at 5.30 in the morning.

It was a carefully planned raid, with targets being the Shoreline club where Hal regularly played, the Littleton-on-Sea Marina, and a boatyard just a couple of miles upriver. Several private houses were also raided, and a large number of arrests made, as well as a fair haul of illegal substances confiscated. Fortunately there were no fatalities and few injuries.

Julian Church was arrested at a very exclusive residence where he was paying a visit, and would now be paying an unplanned visit to prison, probably for a very long time.

The three men held on the charge of abduction, rape, and murder of a minor had decided that they might as well be hung for sheep as for lambs, and decided to take down with them anyone that they could. Julian Church was the highest up the chain that their knowledge extended.

Evidence gathered from this raid and the resultant arrests ended the no-go area that had been the cases against Lord, Edwards, and Stoner, and those murders could now be added to their charge sheets, along with that of conspiracy to murder against Church.

Peter ‘Cliff’ Hanger, the man who had been involved in the head-on collision at the outset of this case, never recovered consciousness and died a week after the drugs raid from a blood clot on the brain.

For a while, a short while, peace and sobriety reigned in Littleton-on-Sea.

EPILOGUE

November bled into December. The weather remained cold but was drier than it had been, and Littleton-on-Sea looked very pretty with its crust of frost, decorated shops and festive lights strung everywhere, lit trees twinkling from front windows. The sound of Slade was abroad all over the town, adding to the seasonal atmosphere.

Olivia Hardy, after work one night, sat in her car in the police station car park in a reflective mood. The town sounded good, it looked very attractive, but she knew that under the surface there still existed the dark underbelly of the town, the violence, the criminality, and the law-breaking.

The place was a series of half-healed wounds all just waiting to be scratched for their infection to bubble to the surface again, and for the evil merry-go-round to clank into life once more, its unsettling, slightly out of tune piped music bleeding into the dreams of the innocent and blighting their lives.

The only question was, when?

THE END

Andrea Frazer

Strangeways to Oldham
The Curious Case of the Black Swan Song
Choral Mayhem

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Published by Accent Press Ltd 2015

ISBN 9781783758463

Copyright ©
Andrea Frazer
2015

The right of
Andrea Frazer
to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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