Jack Rutherford and Amanda Lacey Box Set

by Linda Coles

  “Vivian,” he called as he got closer. “Vivian!” he tried again. She heard the second time and turned as he reached her. She broke into a smile as he spoke. “I don't have your number anymore, and a drink would be nice.”

  “Give me your phone, Jack,” she said.

  “What do you want that for?” he said, taking it out of his pocket.

  “So I can put my number in it for you, silly,” she said, laughing lightly. “I thought you were a detective.” He watched as her long, pale pink fingernails tapped her details into his phone. She finished and handed it back. “Call me, soon, Jack.”

  “I will,” he said.

  He walked back to the sandwich shop, paid for his order and drove back to the station. It was one of those journeys where you remember absolutely nothing of it, not a thing, and you wonder how you arrived at your destination safely and in one piece.

  His mind had been somewhere else completely.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Amanda could see something was on Jack’s mind as they sat in the sunshine eating their sandwiches on a low brick wall in the car park. While there were no park benches or shady trees, it was better to sit outside than in the stuffy petri dish indoors. The building itself gave some shade to their heads, and the sun was welcoming on their arms and legs. Jack chewed thoughtfully on his chicken salad sandwich and pointed to Amanda’s boots with a mayonnaise-smeared finger.

  “Aren’t your feet stifled in those during summer?”

  Amanda looked down at her Docs. They shone in the bright light, but they shone in dull light too. Amanda was almost fanatical about polished footwear; it was one of her major gripes with others, particularly her work colleagues. Shoes and how you looked after them said a lot about a person. Hers said “functional, strong, and polished.”

  “No more than yours probably are right now,” she replied. “Talking of which, your shoes could do with a polish. You’re letting the side down, Jack.”

  Jack glanced down. Amanda was right, of course. “I’ll ask Mrs Stewart to do them.”

  “You’re a big boy now. Why don’t you do them yourself?” She watched as he crammed a couple of ready-salted crisps into his mouth with the remains of his last bite of sandwich. There really wasn’t room, and she curled her nose up at him. Crumbs fell to the concrete beneath their feet.

  “Mrs Stewart loves looking after me and my things. It gives her joy. Who am I to take that joy away from her?”

  Amanda rolled her eyes in disbelief. The thing was, she knew Jack was correct, and he himself loved being looked after. It was the perfect match for them both.

  “Pity she’s a bit old for you to become romantically involved with.”

  “I used to wonder what an older woman would be like,” he said, deadpan, gazing off into the distance. Amanda stopped chewing.

  “When?”

  “When I was about twenty, like all young men do, I suppose.”

  “I was going to say—I thought you meant recently. Anyway, age doesn’t matter, though I doubt any woman would want to be in your life as a skivvy only. Even if Mrs S was interested in you, it would change things.”

  Jack turned to face Amanda full on. “Why are we having this conversation? Mrs Stewart could be my grandmother almost.”

  “How about your friend Vivian, then? She looked more your age, and you two go way back.”

  Jack wondered if she’d been sniffing already. How else would she know they went ‘way back’?

  “And what makes you think that?”

  “You said as much.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Jack turned away, pondering, but was saved from any further inquisition by Amanda’s phone ringing. The opening bars of Landscapes’ “Einstein A Go Go” beep-beeped. It was Faye, the pathologist. Jack smiled at Amanda’s choice of ringtone; better than Elton John’s “Better off Dead,” at least. He finished the last of his crisps and scrunched the packet noisily, earning him a glare from Amanda. He motioned to her to put the call on handsfree and she obliged.

  “Hi, Faye. I have Jack with me too. Have you got something for us?”

  “Yes, sort of, and hello, Jack.”

  He waved a ‘hello,’ not that she could see him.

  “What’s the ‘sort of’?” Amanda enquired.

  “It would be better for me to show you. Any chance of you coming over to the lab?”

  Amanda looked at her watch. “We’ll be there in twenty, if that works for you?”

  “Perfect. See you shortly.”

  Amanda tapped to end the call and put the last of her sandwich in her mouth, passing the remaining crisps to Jack.

  “Come on. I’ll drive,” she said, and they headed over to her car. They flinched as they opened the doors; it was like a furnace inside. They slipped in and Amanda started the engine.

  “You can play with the air con. I’m sick of trying to get it right,” she said as they headed out, the fan on full bore. “I’ll be almost glad when winter comes back. It’s easier to manage, temperature-wise. Set it on hot and leave it.”

  As Jack twiddled with the knobs, they headed across town and back to the morgue in the lunchtime traffic. As they pulled into the car park almost twenty minutes later, the car was the perfect temperature to sit in.

  “Shame it will be like a spit roast again by the time we come back out,” she said, tossing her bag strap over her shoulder. They walked up to the double doors and waited for them to slide open. At reception, a pretty woman with long, shiny black hair greeted them. Tiny pearl studs were only just visible on her earlobes; her lips were painted a deep pink. Jack took everything in like she was a crime scene. Details were his thing. His eyes dropped to her name badge—Gloria. She suited the name.

  “Dr Faye Mitchell is expecting us,” Amanda said as the lift doors behind them pinged open, revealing Faye in her white lab coat.

  “I saw you arrive. Come on up.” She held the door and the two walked over to the lift. Jack gave a slight wave to Gloria, ever the gentleman.

  Amanda leaned in. “Too young,” she whispered, though Faye had no difficulty hearing the comment.

  “Are you on the lookout, Jack?” Faye asked, somewhat amused.

  “Why is my personal life the topic of discussion for the second time today?” he enquired stiffly.

  Amanda and Faye glanced at one another and smirked. Jack kept his back to them as the lift took them up to Faye’s office. Thankfully for Jack, it was a short journey, though he could feel sniggering going on behind him. He shook his head in comical disbelief as the doors opened again and waited for the two women to go on ahead.

  When they were finally seated in the doctor’s office, Faye went through her findings and then sat back in her chair with a questioning look.

  “First, why didn’t you mention that DI Dupin was the person who hit the victim?” She didn’t look pleased.

  Amanda took the question, as the senior officer.

  “We didn’t want your judgement clouded. We figured if you didn’t know, it wouldn’t sway you in either direction if something wasn’t one hundred percent. We didn’t want to influence you.”

  “You wouldn’t have. I work with the facts, and only the facts,” Faye said sharply. “I work with what the body tells me; it alone gives me the story of what happened. I don’t care if it’s the Queen on my examination table. And even if I wanted to alter the facts, there is always the chance of another autopsy being done—you know that. So no, you wouldn’t, never will influence my decision. Do I make myself clear?” Her voice had risen with the last sentence, and both detectives squirmed uncomfortably.

  She went on, “Now that I have that out of the way, I can tell you that Callum Parker’s heart and liver were both enlarged, most likely from alcohol abuse. He was a drinker, even if he wasn’t over the limit at the time of the accident, the initial crash.” Nobody dared to interrupt her. “There was also blood inside the skull from a brain bleed, though that did
n’t come from the single blow to the chin.”

  Jack dared to speak now. “So DI Dupin didn’t kill him, then?” He looked at Amanda with wide-open eyes, almost a look of celebration.

  “No, that blow didn’t kill him. If the fight had caused his death, I’d expect a lot more soft tissue injury, and there isn’t any.”

  Jack pumped his fist in the air and Amanda let a long breath out. DI Dupin was in the clear.

  “So, what killed Callum Parker then, Doc?” Jack said.

  Faye pulled out the autopsy photos from a folder and laid them out in front of them: pictures of the neck and accompanying arteries that she had taken out to show a colleague for further inspection. Jack remembered his remark about “dangly bits” and taunting Japp out in the car park afterwards.

  “You might remember I took these out for further analysis.” She pointed to the photos as she spoke. “It’s an odd thing that’s happened. It’s called a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage. Let me explain.”

  “Please do,” said Jack. He inched forward in his seat to get a closer look. It was far more pleasant to view photos than the real-life wet and bloody specimens.

  “When we drink alcohol, it can raise our blood pressure. Add to that the frantic turning of the steering wheel first one way,” she demonstrated, “and then the other to correct the car and avoid collision. By doing that, Callum Parker inadvertently dislocated his spine here,” she said pointing. “That in turn ruptured this artery, sending blood into the brain.” She stopped to check they were both following. “All the activity immediately after the crash—the aggression, the lashing out and the increase in blood pressure—accelerated that bleeding. Now, it might have only been slight to start with, but by the time he arrived home, it proved fatal. It can take from a few minutes to hours for the blood to spread up to the skull.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” said Amanda. “The punch from DI Dupin was nothing to do with his death?”

  “Correct.”

  “And he died of a freakish dislocated spine that burst an artery and filled his skull with blood.”

  “Correct.”

  “Wow.”

  “Quite. It’s not common, but it happens. Occasionally it’s genetics. DI Dupin is not at fault here. If Callum Parker hadn’t wrestled the steering wheel as he had, hadn’t had a couple of drinks and hadn’t tried to punch Dupin, he might still be here now. It was no one’s fault. Rather, it was a series of moves that ended up proving fatal. Callum was a dying man on the drive back home; he simply didn’t realise it. The punch on the chin made no difference whatsoever.”

  Jack sat back in his chair, thinking. He hadn’t got a lot of time for Dopey, but he wouldn’t wish a manslaughter charge on him either.

  It also raised a question concerning another case on his mind.

  Chapter Thirty

  “I really can't believe it,” Jack said as he and Amanda headed back to the lift and down to reception. “Shall you tell him the good news, or shall I?”

  “We should tell Japp first, since he was the one who told Dupin in the first place. What a weird situation, eh? I've never heard of such a thing, though she did say it could be a genetic condition. All her evidence points to the accident itself—his own actions killed him, not Dupin.”

  The doors pinged closed and they travelled the short distance back down to reception.

  “It's made me think of Hardesty and his situation,” said Jack, as they walked across the lobby. “Pathology, I assume, has got more accurate over time. And I've got to say I'm wondering if something similar happened in his case that perhaps got missed all those years ago. And if that is the case, can I do anything about it now?”

  “Yes, but Jack, the guy was a bad lad anyway. He’d probably have ended up inside anyway; if not for that then for something else. He was a career criminal.”

  “Maybe so, but that doesn't make him a killer directly, and that's what his sentence is for. It’s on his record for life, such as it is. Just like they caught Al Capone on a technicality and stuck him inside, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.” Jack could feel himself getting hot under the collar about it, although he sensed Amanda wasn’t too fussed. It was obvious she didn't share Jack's concern for Hardesty, or the fact that he was rotting in prison and maybe hadn't done the crime he’d been convicted of. That didn’t sit well with Jack, and since he'd been part of the original investigation, it felt a little more personal, much closer to home than it might for anyone else.

  Apart from Eddie Edwards, the arresting officer at the time.

  They were almost back at Amanda's car, and Jack could see heat waves floating across the bonnet. As Amanda clicked her key fob to unlock the car, Jack stated the obvious. “It's going to be like a barbeque inside there,” he said in a singsong voice. A rush of hot air like a hairdryer hit him as he opened the door and sat himself in the passenger seat. Amanda wound the windows down immediately, and Jack twiddled with the air-conditioning and wondered what his old boss Eddie was doing these days. He’d not seen the man for some years.

  “I'm sure Japp will be pleased,” said Amanda, as they set off back to the station, “and it’s good news for the rest of the team too. I know it's been preying on people's minds; it's been quite distracting, actually.”

  “The press are going to go nuts at this,” said Jack. “I hope that Callum Parker's family are satisfied with the results, but I can't help feeling they're not going to be. Particularly his fiancée Melissa. She'll be a right flighty set of bagpipes, that one.”

  “A flighty set of bagpipes?’ enquired Amanda.

  “You must have noticed the size of her chest, surely, and you can't tell me they’re real. And she appears to be a bit of a mouthpiece about all this, so all in all, a flighty set of bagpipes. My observations are spot-on. Case rested.”

  Amanda had to smile. Jack was never crass or crude, but that didn't mean his eyes didn't work like those of any other warm-blooded male when it came to a woman's body. Particularly a manufactured one at that.

  “So, you don't agree with plastic surgery, then?” she asked, knowing the answer.

  “Nope. Make do with what you’ve got, and make the most of it; that’s my motto.” He turned to gaze out the side window as they headed back out onto the dual carriageway. As usual, it was slow-moving. She indicated to cut across into the outside lane, which was moving slightly faster, and navigated the traffic back to the station. Jack checked his watch.

  “Do you fancy an ice cream?”

  Amanda glanced across at him and shook her head. “You're going to be piling all the weight back on that you've lost over recent weeks if you keep eating like you are. Have a bottle of water instead.”

  “You sound like my grandma now.”

  “Your grandma's dead.”

  Disappointed that he wasn't going to get his ice cream, Jack turned his mind back to what they just learned from the pathologist. A sub-arachnoid hemorrhage. Who would have thought it?

  “So, what's the plan then, boss?” he said. “What order are we doing things?”

  “We'll tell Japp first, and then I guess we'll go and see the Parker family and see what happens from there. Hopefully, they’ll accept the findings and everyone can move on.”

  “And if they don't move on, and Bagpipes causes a stink?”

  “In my experience, I expect they'll call for another autopsy and see what that shows up,” she said. “But also, in my experience, Faye Mitchell is one of the best and there will be no mistakes.”

  Jack grunted an agreement. He’d never known her to get it wrong in all the times they’d worked together over the years.

  “She got a bit feisty when we suggested she might be swayed one way or the other. It was stupid, really; she's always been one hundred percent professional. That's why she never gives an opinion before the facts are there to support it.”

  It was Amanda's turn to grunt an acknowledgement; Jack was, of course, right. She glanced at her wristwatch; time was marching on, a
nd she needed to hurry if she was to get to the flat-warming party on time. She hated letting Ruth down, but there was still work to do before she could head off home to change.

  The electric gate slipped back at the station car park, and she pulled into her space and turned the engine off. She didn't immediately move, but instead turned to Jack.

  “You know, this could have happened to anyone—something simple like a car accident, where neither party appears injured, and all the time deep inside someone's head nature is taking its course and silently killing them. It’s quite horrendous, really. I suppose when your time is up, it's time to go.” She was staring straight through the windscreen at nothing in particular, and as Jack followed her gaze, he wondered what was making her feel so maudlin.

  “Then we need to make the most of our time while we've still got it,” he said, reaching to open his door. The warm sun in contrast to the cold fridge of the car was welcoming, and Jack took a moment to stretch like a cat, dropping his head back for the briefest moment. He felt his neck click, the tiny bubbles of gas dissipating from around the bony joints. Thinking of what he’d just learned, he pulled his head back up slowly and followed Amanda back into the station. It had been a learning experience, although a depressing one. On days like this he was glad he had something else to do with his time of an evening that brought joy instead of pain. He was looking forward to his bowling match tonight, a spot of light relief in contrast to his somewhat melancholy though educational day.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Amanda dropped her bag on her desk and, with Jack in tow, headed straight to DCI Japp's office. She rapped on his open door with a knuckle. Over her shoulder, Jack saw Japp's head rise and his eyes readjust away from the document he had been reading. Even though Japp knew Amanda, to Jack there seemed to be a satellite delay of a couple of seconds before it registered who was actually standing there in front of him.