Reckless Endangerment (2 page)

Sharon replaced the receiver and turned on to her back. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

‘Not yet,’ said the man.

‘No, please, I can’t,’ protested Sharon lamely.

‘Liar!’ said the man.

‘No, really, not now,’ she said, but nevertheless locked her legs tightly around his body.

The first-class passenger was not the only man in Sharon’s life. He was just one of a select group of lovers who travelled on her flights and to whose advances she willingly surrendered, as she had today. She had to admit, if only to herself, that she was an insatiable nymphomaniac. But it was the man with whom she had just spent an hour in bed who interested her the most, and the one whom it was her intention eventually to ensnare. By whatever means.

Sharon Gregory had been born an only child in Basildon, but had been trying for almost the whole of her short life to eradicate traces of her ‘estuary’ accent and what the sneering classes scathingly described as ‘Essex girl’ characteristics. She had even considered taking elocution lessons, but decided instead that she would listen carefully to the better educated of her passengers and try to emulate the way in which they spoke. In this she achieved some success, although the occasional grammatical slip would betray her origins.

Sharon’s parents still lived in Basildon, in the same depressing little house in which she’d been born, and in her view they had done nothing to improve themselves. Her father had been a train driver, but had been disabled in an accident and forcibly retired from his job with a meagre pension, and her mother was suffering from some awful debilitating disease. Sharon avoided visiting them, claiming that the demands of duty meant she was often away. The truth of the matter was that she couldn’t abide being in the company of sick people, even when they were her own family.

But Sharon was a very selfish person, accustomed always to getting her own way. And most of the time she succeeded.

However, just over twelve months later there was to occur an incident that put paid forever to the reckless endangerment that typified Sharon Gregory’s immoral and self-indulgent lifestyle.

It was a Saturday evening towards the end of July and it was hot, unbearably hot. All the windows were open in the Gregorys’ house in Tarhill Road, West Drayton, less than three miles from Heathrow Airport, but it made little difference to the temperature, even though it was now ten o’clock at night. The odour of aircraft kerosene fuel that always seemed to pervade the area was even more pronounced because the humidity prevented it from dispersing.

Outside, the usual crowd of noisy Saturday-night revellers, young men and teenage girls mostly, were passing the house on their way to the pub, or making their way to the garish nightclub a few yards further on, the heavy beat of its sound system polluting the still evening air for miles around.

Sharon Gregory hated the domesticity of housework and was grateful that her job meant that she was rarely at home to do it. Nevertheless, she was pottering about in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and clearing up after dinner. Because of the heat, her long, honey blonde hair was clipped back into a ponytail and she was wearing nothing but a diaphanous cheesecloth kaftan.

Clifford Gregory yawned, turned off the television and ambled through to the kitchen. ‘I think I’m going to turn in, love. How about you?’

‘I’m just making your cocoa, Cliff. I’ll bring it up when you’re in bed, and I’ll come in with you a bit later on.’ Sharon Gregory wished that her husband wouldn’t call her ‘love’; it was so working class. Even though she was working class herself, she had been trying to shake off that image ever since leaving her birthplace. But Clifford had never used any other form of endearment during their seven years of marriage.

In fact, she often wondered if he noticed her at all. She thought, as she had done over and over again, what a mistake it had been to marry a man fourteen years her senior; a man who had turned out to be a boring accountant whose only interest was watching sport on television and spending hours making his wretched model aeroplanes. There were at least twenty of the damned things hanging from the ceiling in the study and Clifford could identify each one and accurately describe the history of its original.

Clifford and Sharon had met on a short-haul flight from Glasgow to Heathrow, and he had asked her out to dinner that very night. At nineteen years of age, she had been completely besotted by a man she had seen as handsome, mature, sophisticated, attentive and amusing, and over the ensuing months he had wooed her and made love to her repeatedly. And he had been breathtakingly inventive as a lover. But once they were married, a matter of two months later, all that had changed.

Over the course of the seven years since, his once chiselled good looks had become fleshy, he had run to fat and developed a paunch that he was ill disposed to do anything about. Even more irritating, he had attempted to disguise the onset of his baldness by effecting a ridiculous fold-over hairstyle. And at ten o’clock each night when Sharon was at home, he would announce that he was ‘going to turn in’. And that was it: never any compliments on her appearance, never any affection, and definitely never any sex. The marriage was empty and loveless. It drove her mad and she felt trapped.

‘When are you on duty again?’ asked Cliff, pausing on his way out of the kitchen.

‘Next Wednesday afternoon, LHR to MIA, as usual.’ Sharon knew it was a formal question and one that he asked every time she was at home. But she sensed that he wasn’t really interested in whether she was there or not.

‘
Where
?’ Clifford raised his eyebrows.

‘Oh for God’s sake, Cliff!’ Sharon snapped at her husband impatiently. ‘Heathrow to Miami International,’ she said, slowly and distinctly. ‘I must have told you a hundred times what those codes mean. And to think you’re interested in aeroplanes.’

‘Oh yes, I believe you have, love.’ Clifford seemed not to notice her censorious tone and smiled infuriatingly.

‘I’ll make your cocoa.’ It appeared to Sharon that nothing would rile or excite her placid lump of a husband. Not even flaunting herself naked, as she frequently did.

Waiting until she heard him mounting the stairs, she put a single mug of cocoa in the microwave and switched it on. Once the cocoa was ready, she paused briefly to shed her kaftan and sling it over a kitchen stool.

Clifford was already in bed when Sharon entered the master bedroom. She handed him the mug of cocoa and sat down in a chair, waiting for him to drink it.

‘Aren’t you having any, love?’ he asked, completely oblivious to her nakedness.

Oh, if only he’d show some interest in my body and ask me if I was coming to bed,
she thought.
Or better still throw me on the bed and force himself on me. Oh God, how deliciously exciting that would be.
But she knew it was a vain hope.

‘In a minute.’ Sharon had plenty of time; she had been preparing for this day for over a year now. ‘I’ll have mine in the kitchen. I’ve one or two things to do downstairs. I’ve got to close all the windows for a start.’

‘Oh Lord! Did I forget? Sorry, love, I should’ve done that.’ Clifford slowly consumed his cocoa. When he had finished, he put the mug on the bedside table, settled down and turned over so that his back was towards his wife.

Sharon returned to the ground floor and walked around the house, closing the windows. As she was in the act of drawing the curtains in the sitting room, a youth spotted her, paused wide-eyed, and then whistled loudly. She quickly closed the curtains.

Finally she went into the sitting room and sat down on the settee. Glancing at her wristwatch – the only thing she was wearing – she settled down to wait the hour before the next part of her plan could be brought to fruition.

She firmly believed that she had thought of everything, but in that she could not have been more wrong. Whatever else she may have learned in her short life, modern crime detection methods did not feature highly.

I
have no idea why it should be that murders always seem to be carried out at a time that is most inconvenient to the police officers who are assigned to investigate them. Perhaps I’m just unfortunate enough to catch the homicides that occur in the small hours. Doubtless a team of erudite criminologists at some obscure university has spent thousands of pounds – or dollars – conducting a survey on the subject and will eventually publish its inconsequential conclusions. Nevertheless, such findings would undoubtedly be seized upon by the directing staff at the College of Policing and enthusiastically moulded into a grandiloquently boring lecture. And repeatedly delivered by a member of the team of resident sociologists to every successive course at what is laughingly referred to as ‘the policeman’s university’.

On the occasion of my latest murder it was getting on for one o’clock on a Sunday morning in late July. For once I was in my own bed rather than that of my girlfriend. The day had witnessed the onset of a heatwave, and at close to midnight it was still very hot and I had gone to bed with just a sheet over me and the windows wide open. For an hour, I twisted and turned, but was unable to sleep, not helped by the noise of the main-line trains passing through the nearby Surbiton railway station almost beneath my window.

Eventually giving up the struggle, I got up, intent on making myself a cup of tea and watching a repeat on television when my mobile rang.

‘DCI Brock, sir?’ queried the voice.

‘Yes, this is Harry Brock.’

‘It’s Gavin Creasey at the incident room, guv’nor. Did I disturb you?’

‘No, I had to get up to answer the phone,’ I said sarcastically. I knew that Creasey thought he might’ve been disturbing something else. ‘What is it, Gavin?’

‘A burglary and murder at Tarhill Road, West Drayton, guv. A private dwelling. One male victim.’

‘Wonderful! Just what I need. Arrange for a car to pick me up, Gavin.’

‘It’s on its way, guv.’ Creasey paused. ‘You
are
at Miss Sutton’s place, aren’t you?’ he enquired archly.

It was an open secret among the members of my team at Homicide and Serious Crime Command West that I was in a relationship with a shapely blonde named Gail Sutton, and was more likely to be in her bed than in my own.

‘Strangely enough, Gavin, I’m in my own flat.’

‘Oh, I’ll get on the air and divert them to your address, sir,’ said Creasey, sounding rather surprised. ‘I’ve alerted the principal actors and the supporting cast in this latest drama, and they’re on the way.’

‘Thank you, Gavin.’ The people he was talking about comprised Detective Inspector Kate Ebdon and Detective Sergeant Dave Poole, as well as the other members of my Murder Investigation Team. Dr Henry Mortlock, the Home Office pathologist, and Linda Mitchell, a senior forensic examiner, and her assistants, would also have been invited to the party. It was the standard turnout procedure and swung into action like a well-oiled machine.

The traffic unit car arrived five minutes later.

‘Good morning, sir. A lovely morning for it,’ said the driver, with an exuberance that I found quite nauseating.

‘Matter of opinion,’ I muttered, regretting that I’d been obliged to don a jacket and a tie, and was perspiring already.

The driver covered the fifteen miles from Surbiton to West Drayton in as many minutes, blue lights blazing and siren blaring, although neither seemed necessary at that time of the morning. Emerging somewhat shakily from the high-powered BMW, I concluded yet again that this near-maniacal driving was a deliberate ploy on the part of the Black Rats to test the nerves of CID officers. I shouldn’t really worry; the Met’s drivers are among the finest in the world. But I do worry. Only about my personal safety, though.

‘Good morning, sir. Mr Brock, isn’t it?’ Amazingly, the smart young lady inspector holding a clipboard and pen recognized me. I couldn’t recall ever having investigated a murder in West Drayton before and I didn’t know why she should have known me.

‘Yes, I’m DCI Brock.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the inspector, as she made a note on her clipboard. ‘DI Ebdon, DS Poole and Doctor Mortlock are here already. And Miss Mitchell and the evidence recovery unit are working in the house somewhere.’

Obviously lady incident officers were more wide awake at twenty minutes to two on a Sunday morning than were their male counterparts. We could use someone like her in the Department, and that prompted a thought.

‘Have you ever considered a transfer to the CID, Inspector?’ I asked.

‘Good God, no!’ exclaimed the inspector, as though I’d just made an indecent suggestion.

I was saved from further discussion on the subject by the approach of a youthful individual dressed in an expensive linen suit.

‘Morning, guv. I’m Tom Watson, the hat DI.’

When Watson described himself as ‘the hat DI’, he didn’t mean that he wore a hat; in fact he was bareheaded. HAT is yet another of the many acronyms to emerge from the Metropolitan Police ‘funny names and total confusion squad’ and indicated that he was a member of the Homicide Assessment Team. Its members comprise a select group of CID officers who patrol around the clock and are called to the scene of suspicious deaths by the local CID.

It is up to the HAT officer to decide whether or not a murder is of sufficient complexity to require an investigator from HSCC. Like me. But they’ve yet to do me the favour of deciding that the murders that occur when I’m next on the list could have been dealt with by the local detectives.

‘What’s the SP, Tom?’ I asked, culling a useful bit of shorthand from the racing fraternity, although to a CID officer it doesn’t mean ‘starting price’ but ‘what’s the score?’, or in English: ‘Be so good as to bring me up to date on what has occurred so far.’

‘It’s a funny one, guv,’ said Watson predictably.

‘Aren’t they all?’ I replied, hoping that one day someone would come up with a newer cliché with which to start a conversation about a murder.

‘A guy called Sidney Miller,’ Watson began, referring to his pocketbook, ‘put up a 999 call at eleven forty-five to say that he’d heard a woman screaming. He went outside and eventually found that it came from this house.’ He cocked a thumb of indication. ‘It belongs to a couple called Gregory. Miller’s house is next door,’ he added, pointing. ‘Going to investigate, Mr Miller discovered that the front door was ajar. Just inside, on the floor in the hall, he found Mrs Sharon Gregory, the occupant, lying on the floor, stark naked and trussed up with rope. She claimed that she’d been attacked by a burglar.’ He paused ominously. ‘Miller took a look around the house to make sure that the intruder was no longer there, and found that Mrs Gregory’s husband, Clifford, was dead in the couple’s bed in the master bedroom. First signs indicate that he was bludgeoned to death. But so far there’s no sign of the murder weapon. At least, it wasn’t anywhere near the body.’