No Middle Ground

by Jack Slater

  ‘Boss?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Silverstone.’

  ‘What the hell does he want at a time like this?’ Dick asked.

  ‘I don’t know but I can guess,’ Pete told him with a grimace.

  *

  Silverstone looked up as Pete entered his office and drew breath ready to lambast the junior man. Then he saw him and stopped. ‘What happened to you?’

  Pete reached up automatically to touch the dressing taped over his cheek. It was beginning to ache again now as the local anaesthetic wore off. ‘Adrian Southam bit me while we were arresting him. I had to go to Casualty, get a rabies shot. Or at least a tetanus,’ he added more seriously.

  ‘But you’re OK?’

  His concern wasn’t personal, Pete thought. It was more about Health and Safety and his own reputation as station chief. ‘Sir.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, you cannot – and you will not – treat this police force as your own private army. You know perfectly well that you cannot be involved in a case involving a family member. It’s against every rule and protocol in the book.’

  ‘I was there, sir. On the ground and in position,’ Pete argued. ‘And my son was in immediate danger. What was I going to do – let a violent criminal get away just to pander to a rule set miles away and years ago by some clueless oik in an office?’

  ‘There are reasons for every rule that we work by, Detective Sergeant, as you well know. And insubordination will not further your cause. If I catch you or your team anywhere near the Steven Southam case, you will be suspended without pay, pending a full and detailed enquiry. And that applies to all of you. Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Crystal. Sir.’ Just don’t even think about giving the case to Simon Phillips, he thought.

  Silverstone was staring at him suspiciously, as if he was looking for an angle, thinking this had been too easy.

  Pete couldn’t resist it. ‘Can I take it you’re going to let DI Underhill do his job, sir?’

  ‘Get out of my office before I bloody sack you, Gayle!’ Silverstone bellowed.

  Pete didn’t need telling twice. He turned sharply on his heel, reached for the door and was out of there, despite his aches and bruises, before Silverstone had a chance to call him back.

  Ben looked up as he approached his desk in the squad room seconds later. ‘Jesus! What happened? Fast-track finally lose the plot?’ he asked.

  ‘Kind of. We’re off the Southam case.’

  ‘Off it?’ Ben protested. ‘We’ve done all the work. How’s that any kind of fair?’

  ‘Life with him rarely is. I did have a dig about letting the guvnor do his job, though, in hopes the case would go to Jim or Mark.’

  ‘I thought I heard yelling. Sounded like a bull having his nuts crushed.’

  Pete couldn’t keep the grin off his face. ‘And doesn’t that sound like a plan? I’d best call the DI and tell him the good news.’ He took out his phone and pressed a speed dial number as Ben’s began ringing on his desk.

  They ended their calls within seconds of each other.

  ‘That was Northants, boss. The ANPR system picked up Joe Hanson’s Peugeot on the A5 at a place called Weedon.’

  ‘Which is exactly how I feel after a visit to Fast-track’s office,’ Pete commented. ‘Weed on. And pissed off. How did he get to somewhere as obscure as that without being picked up before?’

  ‘Must have used back-roads, I suppose. Avoided the cameras. Sat-navs can help you do that.’

  Pete grunted. How he’d got there was irrelevant, as opposed to what he was there for, what he might have done on the way and where he was going next. ‘They need to give him a tug, make sure it’s him driving and, if so, tell him to phone his daughter.’

  ‘I’ll ring them back.’ Ben picked up his desk phone and began to dial as Pete’s mobile began to ring. He checked the screen. Jane. He picked up.

  ‘Boss, what’s going on? The guvnor just told me and Dick to get back to the office.’

  ‘We’re off the Southam case.’

  ‘But… Fast-track got wind, did he?’

  ‘Don’t know about wind but a bad case of hot air.’ Pete tried not to be disrespectful to his seniors in front of the team, but he was still too frustrated and annoyed with the DCI to give much of a damn at the moment, despite Ben’s attempt at distraction.

  ‘We’re on the way.’

  ‘Northants said they’ll pick him up,’ Ben said as Pete laid his mobile phone on his desk.

  ‘Right. Meantime, we need to find out if he’s got a lock-up somewhere. Jill said he’s got no books, receipts or anything at home.’

  Ben thought for a moment then blinked as a memory surfaced. ‘He used to use an old brick shed on his uncle’s farm, I think. It’s a long time ago, but I remember going there with him and Sally. He kept his cement mixer there and some of his other bigger tools. Stone saw, set-squares, acro-props – stuff that wouldn’t fit in his garage without being inside his van. I don’t remember any papers there, but you never know. I perhaps wasn’t paying too much attention to stuff like that.’

  He caught Pete’s look. ‘He was showing me the ropes. Teaching me the job. I thought I might like to get into it at the time.’

  Pete grunted and glanced at the squad room around them with its chaos of papers, computer screens and procedural manuals. ‘What happened?’

  Ben grimaced. ‘We uh… Had a bit of a falling out. He caught me and Sally out there one afternoon without him. Wasn’t happy about it.’

  Pete imagined catching Annie in a quiet spot with a boy in a few years’ time. He wouldn’t be happy either - even though she was sensible enough not to do anything with consequences that she wasn’t prepared for.

  ‘Do you remember where it was?’

  ‘Out along Stoke Hill.’

  A narrow country lane off Pennsylvania Road, north of the city, Pete recalled. It wouldn’t be too far for Hanson to go from his home on Wreford’s Lane. ‘Right, let’s go.’

  ‘What about this lot?’ Ben asked, indicating the large stack of files he’d been working through.

  ‘Make sure you mark them clearly – ones you’ve checked and ones you haven’t. Jane and Dick can take over when they get back. We’ll let them know once we’re on the move.’

  *

  Stoke Hill was a perfect example of how isolated and rural a place could be even though Pete knew that the city centre was only two or three miles away. The narrow lane with tall, dense hedges at either side could have been miles from anywhere.

  ‘Just round the next bend on the left,’ Ben said from the passenger seat.

  Pete let the car slow as they approached the curve in the road. He could hear sheep bleating from somewhere. A blackbird flew, squawking, from the hedge on his right, its wings almost striking the windscreen before it curved away in front of them.

  ‘There.’ Ben pointed towards an ancient red-brick and timber cart barn that faced out directly onto the road. It was partly stacked up with split logs, an old-fashioned Land Rover parked in one of the bays. Behind it, he glimpsed a set of farm buildings that looked as if they might have been constructed soon after the Second World War and, at the far side, a large house, again of red brick, set behind a walled front garden.

  Pete pulled up on the compacted dirt in front of the wood stack.

  The yard behind the cart shed was paved with black flat-topped cobbles strewn with straw and muck. Pete could hear a tractor working in one of the sheds. Then it emerged, a grey-haired man in blue overalls and a flat cap at the wheel. He saw Pete and Ben and stopped the tractor. Leaving it idling, he climbed down and crossed towards them, waiting until he was just a few steps away before speaking.

  ‘Afternoon.’

  Pete nodded. ‘Are you the owner?’ He glanced around the yard.

  ‘Yup. You look like you’ve got on the wrong side of a pit-bull. Who are you?’

  ‘DS Gayle and DC Myers, Exeter CID.’ Pete showed him his warrant card.

  ‘Myers
? I knew one of them, years back.’

  Ben nodded. ‘Yeah, that was me.’

  The man nodded lazily. ‘Thought there was something about your face. What do you want?’

  ‘Does Jonas Hanson still keep some of his stuff here?’ Pete asked, pulling the man’s attention away from Ben in case there was any ill-feeling there, though it was hard to tell with this taciturn figure who could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty.

  ‘He does.’

  ‘Can we see it? He’s gone missing. There might be something there that’d help us find him.’

  The man nodded again. ‘Missing, is he? Off on one of his trips, I expect.’

  ‘Except he never told anyone he was going, which he generally does, apparently.’

  The man’s mouth pulled into a grimace that was as much a shrug. His dark blue eyes returned to Ben. ‘Don’t see how but it’s still where it was.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Pete said. ‘Do we need a key?’

  ‘No locks round here. No need.’

  ‘Thanks, Arch,’ said Ben and turned to Pete, nodding towards one of the low brick buildings at the far left.

  Arch nodded and turned back towards his tractor. As they walked along the front edge of the yard, Pete heard the engine noise increase behind him.

  ‘Chatty feller,’ he said to Ben, having to speak up over the roar of the tractor.

  ‘Always was, boss,’ Ben agreed. ‘Could never work out what he thought of me. Or of much else, to be honest.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Pete said. ‘At least he didn’t thump you. The size of his arms, I’m guessing you’d stay down if he did.’

  ‘I’ve seen him throw an eight-month-old calf on its back. He barely seemed to put any effort into it.’

  The shed the farmer had indicated had an ancient wooden door with a rusty iron latch. Ben reached for it and they stepped into a space that was surprising large but lit only by the cracks in the roof and the light that followed them in through the door. Pete looked around. As predicted, a cement mixer took pride of place. Orange and battered, it stood in the middle of the cobbled floor. To one side of it were a stone-cutting saw and a small pneumatic drill, behind them, along the back wall, was a loose stack of scaffold planks and poles. Over to the left, against the wall, stood a variety of shovels, crowbars, pick-axes and sledge-hammers with two or three long, bright yellow spirit levels and a variety of other tools, almost concealing the side of a dark metal filing cabinet.

  ‘Here we go.’ Pete stepped forward into the gloom. ‘Is there a light in this place?’

  ‘I think so.’ Ben felt around near the door for a couple of seconds then found the switch. A single dim yellowish bulb in the bare rafters was not a lot of help but it was all they were going to get.

  Pete pulled the top drawer of the filing cabinet. It didn’t move. He glanced at Ben. ‘What happened to no locks in this place?’

  ‘Well, I don’t remember any,’ he said. ‘I know, when I used to come over here, even the cars in the yard were left with the keys in.’

  ‘Must be something significant in here, then. Have you got your pen-knife?’

  Ben reached into his pocket to bring out a small, silvery multi-tool. He handed it over and Pete opened one of the blades and used it to force the lock on the cabinet.

  ‘There. Now then…’ The drawer space was filled with dark green hanging files. He reached in and took out a bundle of A5 envelopes from one of them. Started flipping through and opening them at random. Receipts and quotes were mixed together, seemingly at random. He looked for a date. Finally finding one, he read it out. ‘May 2015.’

  Replacing the papers, he took some from the next envelope. A similar mix of quotes, receipts and other bits and pieces. He rifled through them until again, he found a date. January 2015. He continued searching. ‘March ’15.’ So, each folder amounted to a year’s worth of papers.

  In the next folder back, he found November 2014. He looked at Ben. ‘We’re going to have to take this whole bloody lot back to the station and go through it: look for correlations with any missing persons or unsolved deaths. Or with any of that stuff we got from Hanson’s house.’

  ‘What about a warrant?’ Ben asked.

  ‘We got permission from the landowner. Anything on his property is included in that – his or otherwise.’

  Ben nodded. ‘What about forcing the lock?’

  ‘The man said there weren’t any, so I thought it must be stuck,’ Pete shrugged. ‘Best get some crates from the car.’ He kept a few collapsible ones in the boot for instances like this.

  Ben was silent as he stepped outside.

  *

  They finished emptying the third drawer of the cabinet and Pete pushed it closed with his knee as Ben reached for the handle of the fourth and last one. He pulled it open. ‘Whoa. No more files in here.’

  Pete turned back from the crate he’d put the last files into. ‘What you got?’

  ‘Photos. Loads of them.’

  As Pete stepped closer, Ben opened the packet in his hand and pulled out a batch of prints.

  ‘Jesus!’ he said as soon as he saw the top one.

  ‘They weren’t processed by the local mini-lab.’

  Ben checked the packet. It looked like an ordinary commercial one from Boots or some other processing lab. ‘There’s no negatives. They must be printed off a computer.’

  ‘What, all them? There’s a bloody fortune in printing ink and paper there.’

  ‘Well, I never knew him to be into dark-room stuff and they don’t smell of photo chemicals.’ Ben raised the pack to his nose and sniffed then grimaced as if he’d smelled something unpleasant. ‘No. Definitely ink-jet.’ He passed the pictures up to Pete and reached for another pack, flipped it open and dropped it back. Tried another and another as Pete flipped through the ones he’d got.

  ‘They’re all the same, boss.’

  Pete paused at a picture of a young woman with long, dark hair and terrified brown eyes. She was bound, hands behind her back, naked and on her knees in a woodland glade, a gag tight across her mouth. The previous pictures had been a series, tracking through Hanson’s observation of her on the street, her abduction then more shots leading up to this one. He was about three quarters of the way through the pack. He could guess where it would end but he would have to look, much as he didn’t want to. He looked at Ben. ‘How many bloody victims have we got here?’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  They were loading the crates into the back of the car when Ben’s phone rang in his pocket. Pete continued working as he answered it.

  ‘Sal. How are…’

  He paused, listening as she interrupted him.

  ‘Yes, we are, but… Sal, I can’t. It’s an ongoing investigation now.’ Another pause. ‘I know that and it’s not that I don’t want to, but I can’t talk about it at this stage. To anyone.’

  Pete turned to face him, held his hand out for the phone. Ben handed it over without hesitation.

  ‘Sally, this is Pete Gayle.’ He pictured her face when they’d met briefly, earlier in the day. ‘Ben’s right. He can’t talk about an on-going investigation. It’s regulations, plus it’s not his place. As Senior Investigating Officer, it’s mine.’

  ‘So, can you tell me what’s going on? Why you’re out at Uncle Archie’s? He’s not there. I already checked before I even called Ben.’

  ‘Take a breath, Sally. You don’t mind me calling you Sally, I hope?’

  ‘No, just… Whatever. I need to know about my dad, Mr Gayle, that’s all.’

  ‘OK. Well, you’re right. He’s not at his uncle’s. We weren’t expecting him to be. We came out here to see if he’d left any signs of where he might have gone.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No. But that’s OK. We’ve just heard there’s been a sighting of him - or at least of his car - up in the Midlands. Our colleagues up there are following it up as we speak. We’ll let you know as soon as we find out if it’s him or not, OK?�
��

  ‘If it’s his car, why wouldn’t it be?’ Her voice faded as she spoke. ‘If something had happened to him,’ she added, answering her own question.

  ‘We’ve got to stay positive until we know different, Sally,’ Pete said. ‘It’s no good worrying about something that hasn’t happened.’

  ‘Yeah, but… The Midlands? What would he be doing up there?’

  ‘You said he worked all over the country on different occasions,’ he reminded her.

  ‘I know, but he’s packed all that in,’ she argued.

  ‘So maybe he’s gone to visit a friend.’

  She grunted. ‘And not told anyone? I can’t see that. And what about all that stuff in his attic? What’s that all about?’

  ‘What it’s about is simple. Why he’s got it is another question entirely and that, we don’t know the answer to yet.’

  Ben’s eyes went wide at the lie.

  Pete shrugged.

  ‘But you’ll keep me informed, yes?’

  ‘As I said: as soon as we know anything for sure, we’ll call you, all right?’

  ‘OK.’ She sounded reluctant to let go.

  ‘We’ll get to the bottom of it. I promise. In the meantime, is there anything you need? We can send a family liaison officer round if you like. Someone trained in helping people to cope in your kind of situation.’

  ‘I’ve got family for that,’ she said, and Pete could almost hear the curl of her lip.

  ‘All right, then.’ Pete didn’t want to be the one to end the call. That way she’d be less likely to call back. ‘You’re OK now, are you?’

  ‘Far from it, truth be told. But I’ll have to live with it for now, won’t I?’

  ‘We’ll have some answers pretty soon, I’m sure.’

  ‘Right. OK, thanks.’

  She hung up and Pete handed the phone back to Ben. He raised it to his ear, heard the ring tone and ended the call. ‘We don’t know the answer?’ he said. ‘What’s all this, then?’ He waved towards the boot-full of crates.

  ‘Evidence. It’s not proof until we’ve gone through it and tied it all together with what we’ve already got back at the station,’ Pete reminded him.