Team Spirit (Special Crime Unit Book 1) (6 page)

The
Mediterranean beauty turned to look at her. ‘Larissa Stephenson,’ she said,
shaking hands. ‘Most people call me - ’

‘Lucky.’
Nina grinned in spite of herself. ‘I heard.’

‘News
gets around, yeah?’ Lucky crossed to the front door and pushed. Satisfied, she
turned to Nina and said, ‘OK. Let’s go.’

Furious at her own
irrationality, Nina was still smarting at that five minutes later as they
headed towards Shirley. What right did
she
have to give orders? Lucky was the new girl,
she should sit tight and absorb the wisdom. Of course, Nina fumed, stealing a
glance in the mirror, that’s what she
seemed
to be doing,
now
. The cinnamon-coloured face
was open and attentive but the eyes were cold, bleak and lost. She wondered why
she’d ever thought of the kid as ingenuous; it had certainly worn off fast.
Welcome to Special Crime.

Being
fair, she was hardly in the best frame of mind to judge. With a twinge of shame
she concentrated on the task at hand. ‘D’you know De Montfort Court?’

‘Old
people’s home, yeah?’

‘We’re
on a follow-up visit to Violet McMinn, age ninety, assaulted and robbed in the
early hours of yesterday morning. The intruder got in by forcing the bedroom
window.’

‘Not
burglar-proof?’

Nina
shook her head. ‘He beat her severely about the arms and torso, then swiped
several items of jewellery and ornaments including a pair of brass
candlesticks, one of which he sexually violated her with.’ She looked in the
mirror again to see if this was having any effect, but Lucky’s expression was
impassive. ‘The result of all this, she was so traumatised we couldn’t get
anything out of her when we saw her yesterday.’

‘Was
she hurt badly?’

‘Bad
enough. However, she’s wheelchair-bound and very frail. The doctor thought it
was best for her not to be moved, so they’re looking after her at the home.
Which is why we’re going there and not the hospital.’

Lucky
hesitated. ‘You said “he”.’

‘Good
point.’ Nina caught herself being impressed. ‘Inconclusive. No semen deposits,
just the candlestick, which we know about from swabs of verdigris the FME got
from the vagina. CSI lifted some size twelve footprints off the carpet. Faint
denim imprints on the sill, looks like he parked his bum on there and swung his
legs over.’

‘What’s
outside?’

‘Concrete
path.’

‘Course.’

‘Which
at the moment leaves us with just Mrs McMinn. Apparently she’s now lucid enough
to talk to us...’

The
heavy sigh that escaped Lucky caused Nina to take her attention off the road
for a second. But again the dark eyes gave nothing away. Strange girl. Give her
credit, though: keen as mustard. She’d picked up on every point of what Nina
had abstracted from the report. She was beginning to understand why Sophia
(rumour had it) had headhunted her.

Which
reminded her. Nina, who devoured gossip like peanuts at a party, said, ‘This
medal, then.’

Lucky
looked surprised. Understandable, Nina thought with a fleeting pang of remorse:
sudden friendliness from this misassembled crone who’d been giving her a hard
time from the moment she’d stepped through the gate. She smiled and said, ‘All
mine.’

‘I
hear you talked down a suicide from the Norwood mast.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How’d
you do it?’ Nina smiled back. ‘If it’s not breaking a confidence.’

‘I
don’t want to sound bigheaded.’

‘Course
not. I won’t tell anyone.’

Lucky
smiled again and brushed a hand in front of her face. ‘I said to him,’ she
replied, choosing her words cautiously, ‘look me up and down, and did he really
want to chuck away a world when there were girls like me in it to chase after.’
She flinched as she saw Nina’s expression start to change. ‘It was the first
thing that came into my head.’

Aghast,
Nina heard herself laughing. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, tapping Lucky on the
knee with her gear hand, ‘I don’t believe in hiding my light under a bushel
either.’

‘I
dunno about that - I’m not vain,’ Lucky said. ‘But when you’re sitting on a
girder with half a mile of fresh air under your arse you get a very clear
perspective on sin.’

‘You
a Catholic and all, then?’ Nina giggled.

‘Bulgarian
Orthodox,’ Lucky said. ‘Much as I try not to be.’

She
stared into her lap, and Nina was still trying to work out what that meant when
the Mini breasted Spout Hill, trundled down into Shirley village and the
building she was looking for appeared on the right. She said, ‘Let’s go to
work.’

‘You know what gets
me,’ Nina broke a long silence on the drive back afterwards, ‘why we always
feel so guilty.’

‘Guilty?’
Lucky said.

‘Don’t
you?’ Nina tried to inject a lighter note into her voice. It came out as a
squeak. ‘I mean we’re there to detect. What’s to feel guilty about?’

The
question hadn’t been intended as rhetorical, but even as she repeated it the
answer came to her in fragments. It was the terrible fear, the knowledge, that
though they might detect the perpetrator of the crime against Mrs McMinn, nothing,
absolutely nothing, they did or said could take back what had happened to her.
This was a woman who’d lived through a century during which the world had
changed beyond recognition; who’d battled, loved and mothered through a world
war, a depression, the collapse of an empire, the Cold War, man on the moon,
the opening of the atomic and electronic ages; who’d witnessed it all, and come
through adversity and triumph with a lifetime of achievement to mark against
her name. But for Violet McMinn, an invaluable treasury of experience had been
indelibly tainted in one hellish moment; what should have been final years
passed in quiet, proud dignity obliterated by the senseless act of a slag with
no regard for that worth.

Some
time since the previous day she’d fought and suppressed the demon in her head,
and greeted them with the stoical calm bred into so many of her generation. Her
blue eyes were the only part of her now that was not lucid: they stared bleakly
beyond the two policewomen and into purgatory. She gave calm and courteous
answers to their questions, made her statement, and seemed to reach into Nina’s
heart and see the ill-defined revulsion that lay there. She understood that
there was only one thing they could do.

‘Just
catch the evil little toerag,’ had been her parting words.

Easy
to say.

‘Maybe
it’s losing control,’ Lucky said, interrupting Nina’s dark thoughts.

‘Control
of what?’

‘Sometimes
you can’t master the disgust. You think you’re feeling it worse than the
victim, and that’s why you feel guilty.’

‘I
guess what it boils down to,’ Nina said, after a pause, ‘I just wanted to get
out of there. No, worse, I wanted it never to’ve happened. I couldn’t handle
it.’

‘That’s
it exactly,’ Lucky said with sudden sharpness. ‘You’re meant to be tough, not
feel like that. That’s the victim’s prerogative.’

Nina
looked at her in surprise.

They got back to
the office just as Zoltan Schneider said into the phone, ‘Right, guv. Yep. I’ll
get it sorted.’ He hung up and called across the room, ‘OK. One volunteer for
obbo tonight. Don’t all leap up at once.’

Nina,
who’d just finished booking in, raised her arm and walked over to her desk
without looking at him. She sat down and glanced up to find the DI smiling at
her like a crocodile.

He
said, ‘You feeling all right, Nina?’

‘I
said I’d do it.’

‘It’s
only for a couple of hours.’

‘Fine.’

He
waited. Nina wiggled her mouse, waited for the screensaver to disappear and
started typing in her password.

‘Don’t
you want to know what it is?’ Zoltan enquired.

A taxi’s clattering
diesel engine woke her and she sat up with a start, cursing under her breath.
She looked at the dashboard clock. Twenty to midnight. ‘Shit!’ she said aloud.
How many times? How often had she been told, had it hammered home again and
again by the instructors at Hendon and every guv’nor since, never, never fall
asleep on obbo? She scrabbled around for the log, peered out through the
windscreen into Ballards Way, and said again, helplessly, ‘Shit!’

Then
she stopped, and sat back. Her short-term memory had just kicked in, reminding
her that she had not, after all, committed the cardinal sin. The rostered two
hours had finished at half past nine and she’d spent some time unwinding,
wondering about the prospects as regarded going home. She must have unwound too
far. Heaving a sigh, she peered across the street to the Clarkes’ house, roof
tiles thrown into sharp relief by the light of an almost full moon. The house
itself was in darkness and the two cars were both in the drive, Mrs Clarke’s
Golf in front. Halfway up the side wall a red pinpoint of light showed that the
burglar alarm was on. No-one was coming in or going out tonight.

She drove home to
Addiscombe. The house was still; presumably everyone was asleep. She let
herself in and crept upstairs, closing the bathroom door before switching on
the light to take out her contacts, remove what remained of her makeup and
brush her teeth. This done, she tiptoed across the landing to the bedroom.

In
the moonlight she could make out a shape under the bedclothes. The painful knot
that had been drawing ever tighter about her stomach loosened. She stood for a
moment in the darkness, listening to the slow, even rhythm of breathing.
Satisfied, she undressed, found her pyjamas folded on the chair by the window,
put them on and climbed gingerly into bed.

‘Mmm?’
a voice muttered.

Nina
said, ‘You awake?’

‘You’ve
just got in.’ There was a stirring, and an arm extended to encircle her waist.
She was kissed, the prickle of encroaching beard growth stinging her lips.

‘Yeah,’
she answered, belatedly. ‘Just this minute.’

‘Where’ve
you been?’

‘Obbo,’
she yawned. ‘Tell you about it in the morning.’

‘Tell
me about it now,’ came the affectionate wheedle. A twinge of irritation stabbed
through her before she could stop it. Hard to believe she’d once found that
wheedle endearing.

She
sighed.

‘I
just need to know you’re all right.’

Nina
said, ‘What time were Mum and Dad home?’

‘Dunno.’

‘What
d’you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I
didn’t hear them.’

‘I
tried to ring, let you know where I was.’

‘When?’

‘Couple
of times. Went to voicemail.’

‘Must’ve
left my phone when I went out.’

‘You
went out?’

‘Yeah.’

Nina
frowned in the dark. ‘Well, if you went out you
won’t
have heard them come in.’

‘No,
s’pose not.’

‘Why’d
you go out, anyway?’

‘I
got bored, rosebud. Rang Terry and went up the Cricketers.’

‘This
late? On a weeknight?’

‘No,
we had a couple of pints and then went back to Terry’s for a game of darts.’

‘They’ve
got darts at the Cricketers.’

‘They
keep falling out the board.’

‘Not
if you throw them properly.’

‘Somebody
hasn’t switched off yet...’ The hand pinched her waist where it held her,
paused and began a tentative foray onto her belly under the pyjama top. She
took hold of the wrist.

‘I’m
tired,’ she said. ‘Sorry, darling. Night-night.’ And she leaned over and
delivered a kiss on the forehead, before turning over and drawing the
bedclothes more tightly around herself. She was asleep in moments.

The
hand was withdrawn, and nothing more was said.

Wrapped in a
blanket, Larissa Stephenson sat propped in a chair in a corner of her room.
Moonlight slanted in through the open curtains and spotlit the bed in a yellow
glare. Every now and then the branches of the apple tree in the garden would
move in the breeze, thrusting shadows in.

Lucky
didn’t know how she’d got through the rest of the day, only that she’d had to.
The initial horror of the visit to Mrs McMinn had turned to overwhelming relief
that at least she hadn’t had to pretend to be cheerful. Nina Tyminski, she
believed, had guessed nothing. She had some preoccupation of her own which was
dulling her intuition. If only the others would be as easy. She felt they
might. Carry on as normal, as if nothing had happened. At any cost, no-one must
know.

But
someone did. He was out there, dancing his mocking dance among the shadows of
the tree, leaping through the window, throwing himself uninvited across her
bed, her haven, sneering at her in the moonlight. She dared not draw the
curtains. Then she would have only the dark. In both worlds lay horror.