by D C Vaughn
The man stood with his hands by his side and a furtive expression on his face. Or at least, what she could see of his face behind the thickly forested beard adorning the man’s jaw. His skin carried the dark hue of constant exposure to the elements, like old leather, and his hair was hidden beneath a tattered woolly hat. His jacket, the collar turned up around his neck, was faded with age, his jeans dull and sheened with filth. Worn boots with no laces were on his feet, his hands wrapped in fingerless gloves.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she demanded, both relieved and disgusted that this man had put his hands on her.
‘I’m Greaves,’ he said. ‘Michael Greeves. I know you don’t know me, but I know you.’
‘You always make a habit of jumping lone women under bridges?’
‘No!’ Greaves yelped, his hands up in horror. ‘I didn’t know any other way of finding you. I’ve been waiting around here for days.’
Rebecca was confused and Greaves saw it as he lowered his hands.
‘I saw what happened to you, on the news, on televisions in the windows of Curry’s,’ he said, gesturing in the general direction of Exeter’s city centre. ‘I’ve been trying to find you ever since.’
‘What for?’
Greaves glanced past her, to where Sam had been attacked. ‘I was under this bridge when you and that fella got attacked,’ he explained. ‘I saw everything.’
***
XII
In a single sentence, Greaves had Rebecca’s absolute and undivided attention.
‘Tell me, now.’
Greaves shook his head. ‘No, sorry ma’am, but I want protection. I’m not just goin’ to sell out to you without a little something for me.’
Rebecca took a pace toward him, all thoughts for her own safety suddenly evaporating in the face of a cold rage that seethed through her like a honed blade slicing flesh.
‘You either tell me, or I swear you’re going to be the next sorry soul somebody drags out of that bloody river. I’m a Detective Constable, in case you didn’t see that in Curry’s, and if you don’t tell me everything you know you’re obstructing the course of justice.’
The man’s eyes narrowed and he pointed a finger at her. ‘I know what happened and you’re suspended from duty. How about I just turn around and walk out of the damned county, take my story with me?’
Rebecca didn’t hesitate. Her training kicking in, fuelled by anger. She snatched Greaves’s wrist in one hand, turned and yanked it toward her as she stuck one shoe inside his heel, twisted the wrist around and turned hard. Greaves was off–balance before he could react and slammed down onto his back on the towpath with a thump as Rebecca folded his arm over awkwardly to pin him in place.
A blast of foul breath soured the air as the wind was knocked from his lungs.
‘You wanna try that again, Greaves?’ she hissed.
Greaves gritted his yellow teeth against the pain as he spat his answer.
‘There was another man on the path!’ he cried out. ‘He shot your fella!’
Rebecca released the wrist and staggered back as Greaves cradled his injured arm in one hand and rolled away from her, cursing to himself. There was another man on the path. Rebecca didn’t recall seeing anyone, but then again what she did recall hadn’t been much use to anyone, least of all her. She saw in her mind’s eye the image of Sam going into the water, the gun in her hand, but there was no memory of a third person.
‘Where did you see them?’ she demanded. ‘I want to know everything!’
Greaves scowled at her. ‘I’m not sayin’ anything else unless you get me a…’
Rebecca moved to kick Greaves in the face, but as the man cowered away from her with panic in his eyes, she caught herself. No. This wasn’t the way. This wasn’t who she was. Rebecca took a deep breath, cleared her mind.
‘I’ll buy you a take away every night this week if you’ll just tell me what happened, okay? It’s important, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Greaves cradled his arm as he watched her cautiously from behind his collar. ‘Nandos?’
‘Marco Pierre–bloody–White if you’ll stop pulling my chain and tell me what you know!’
Greaves slowly got to his feet. Although shabby and unkempt, Rebecca was suddenly aware that he had once been a big man and that she had just floored him. For a moment she wondered how someone like Greaves could end up living in squalor beneath a bridge, how he could have sunk so low, but right now all she cared about was what Greaves had seen.
‘Talk,’ she demanded.
Greaves gathered himself.
‘I was napping under the bridge when you walked past,’ he said. ‘You were with your fella. I didn’t pay much attention but I opened my eyes and watched you walk by. Thing is, when you’re homeless anyone can be a threat, we’re always being attacked by people so we tend to keep one eye open even when we’re half asleep.’
‘Was anyone following us?’
Greaves shook his head.
‘I watched you both walk away down the towpath and then closed my eyes. It was the sound of a shout that made me open them again. Another man was there with you both. I don’t know where he came from but I’m guessin’ he was lying in wait for you, or for someone. I heard the shout, opened my eyes and saw the man point at you. I didn’t know he had a gun at that moment, but then he fired. Your fella pushed the shot high but you went down.’
Rebecca felt a sudden rush of elation as she realised that she was for the first time hearing a vindication not just of her own innocence, but the courage of her fiancé.
‘What happened next?’ she urged Greaves.
The old man squinted as he focused on his memory.
‘The two men struggled, there were two more gunshots. You dropped, and then they both went into the water.’
Rebecca stared at Greaves. ‘You’re sure? They both went into the water?’
‘Definitely,’ Greaves confirmed. ‘Watched them go myself.’
‘And then what?’
Greaves shrugged. ‘Then nothin’. I was going to go and get help, but I heard shouts and voices, other people who’d seen or heard what had happened and were making their way down the bank. You were injured but not alone, so I packed up and got out of there. I knew the police would be coming and they’re always hassling me for one thing or another. I didn’t want to hang around.’
Rebecca shook her head in wonder. Here was the eye witness testimony that she’d been hoping for, the one thread of salvation that would both support her defence and also prove that Samuel Lincoln was no wife–beating maniac who may have lost his life in a senseless mugging.
Then, another thought crossed her mind.
‘The other man, did you get a look at him?’
Greaves shook his head.
‘It was too dark and he was too far away. He had a hoodie on so I couldn’t see anything of him really.’
Rebecca recalled how the body that had been dragged from the river had been described as wearing a dark hooded top. The body could well have been that of the shooter.
‘Would you be willing to go to the police station and make a statement to that effect?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘‘Cause the police are always on my case, I just want to be left alone.’
‘But you came here to find me.’
‘To tell you what I knew,’ Greaves shot back, ‘nothing more. I got nothing to say to no copper or judge. You got what I know, and I got nothin’ to show for it but an aching arm.’
Rebecca dug her hand into her pocket and produced her purse. She pulled a twenty–pound note and handed it to Greaves.
‘There’s more where that came from if you’ll just go to the police and tell them what you know.’
‘I just did,’ Greaves replied. ‘You think a court would base a conviction on the word of a vagrant?’
Rebecca knew that he was right. Eye–witness testimony was a powerful tool in a court of law, but sometimes even cr
owds of people could be mistaken in what they had seen. Any prosecution worth its salt would ask whether Greaves could be sure that it was the hooded man wielding the gun. It was dark, they were some distance away, bodies scrambling. About all his testimony would achieve would be to cast serious doubt on Rebecca’s role in the shooting, which was all she wanted but as she was out of the case and suspended, she could not bring any evidence to bear that could be used in a court of law. It had to come from another, unconnected individual who was willing to take the stand or at least be interviewed.
‘If you don’t help me, I could be arrested and charged with the homicide of my fiancé,’ Rebecca tried again. ‘I could end up serving time for killing the man who probably saved my life.’
She saw a shadow of regret cross Greaves’s features, a hesitation, but then he turned away from her and stalked into the growing darkness.
‘Ain’t my problem, copper. You’re the detective, right?’
Greaves hobbled away, leaving Rebecca as confused as she had been before she’d met him. Her own recollection was of watching Sam fall into the river and of holding a gun in her own hand. Now, Greaves, a man whom she’d never met before, had told her that she had been shot and Sam had fallen into the water while fighting with another man. A sudden, shocking realisation dawned upon her. If she had been hit first, then she would have been unconscious on the ground from that moment onward. Greaves had actually said she had dropped, then the two men had fallen into the water.
The skin on the back of her neck rose up and tingled uncomfortably. Kieran had told her that she had been found on her back in a pool of blood.
‘I couldn’t have seen them fall,’ she gasped.
***
XIII
Detective Constable Hannah Marchant knocked on the fourteenth door that morning, and was greeted by a young mother who looked like she was having a tough time adapting to the rigours of child–rearing. Her hair was wet from the shower, a baby was tucked in her arms sucking on a bottle and Hannah could hear crying from a child somewhere else in the house.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said to the woman. ‘We’re canvassing the area after a body was found down by the river and we wondered if you’d seen or heard anything in recent days?’
Commercial Road was a modern housing estate that backed onto the River Exe, the towpath no more than thirty metres from the backs of some of the houses. Hannah had spent the last two hours walking up and down knocking on doors, one of the less glamorous but no less vital roles played by detectives working major crimes. Police in other countries might have the resources to send out uniforms to canvass crime scenes, but in the United Kingdom if a detective needed leg–work doing, they did it themselves.
‘I didn’t hear anything but I don’t go down that way, not at night anyway,’ the mother replied.
‘Why not?’
The mother looked at Hannah as though she’d been born yesterday. ‘Why’d you think? Gangs of kids hanging around in the underpass, homeless people begging for money by the river, bodies being dragged out of the water; you know, the usual.’
Exeter was not a violent town or one that suffered from an excess of crime or drug issues, but at the same time there was no escaping the fact that every town had its share of drug abusers, criminals, anti–social youths and homeless people. Ordinary people avoided them like the plague, naturally shying away from both their activities and the night time that so often was their domain.
‘You see a lot of homeless around here?’ Hannah pressed, the image of the figure beneath the bridge in the camera footage in her mind. ‘Do you know any of them by name?’
‘Like I said, I don’t go down there,’ the mother replied. ‘Sometimes we see the same people in the same places during the day, wrapped up in their sleeping bags, mostly when its wet. They shelter beneath the bridges.’
Hannah nodded and thanked the woman for her time before retracing her steps back down the road. Pretty much every statement was the same: sure, they knew about the homeless people down by the river, but short of tossing them some loose change from time to time they neither knew them nor entered into conversation with them. The fact that many of the homeless spent their days drunk to stave off the cold and the misery didn’t exactly draw in an eager crowd either.
Hannah headed back to the river walk in the hope of finding at least one of the vagrants camped out either in the subway or under the bridges. The air was cold but the day was dry and she wasn’t sure that she’d strike lucky: many of the homeless spent their days begging in the shopping centres in town or washing up pots and pans in takeaways for pitiful wages, which they would then blow on cheap booze.
She cut left off Commerical Road and down to the river, following it along to the first bridge she came to. The wind gusted beneath the South Bridge and whipped along the water, driving ripples that flickered in the weak sunlight struggling to break through the clouds above. A faint ammoniacal scent tainted the air beneath the bridge and Hannah could see evidence of rough sleepers beneath the bridge supports; discarded beer cans, takeaway bags and Styrofoam coffee cups. But there was nobody there, the cold wind whipping under the bridge probably too harsh for them to hang around long.
Hannah was considering heading into the town centre, to begin the laborious task of hunting down and talking to vagrants who would probably be drunk on cheap cider by lunchtime, when she spotted something in the distance. Under the north bridge she saw what looked like a sleeping bag rolled up against the wall.
Hannah walked the hundred metres or so toward the north bridge, watching the bundle as she approached. The sleeping bag was light blue in colour and surrounded by bags of accumulated trash. The wind was cold in her face and she reckoned that if anyone was sleeping in there, they would have to be wrapped up pretty tight to enjoy anything approaching comfort.
The walls surrounding the bridge supports were smothered with a kaleidoscopic display of graffiti, the tags of countless gangs and other ne’er–do–wells plastering the otherwise dull grey concrete. She approached the sleeping bag and called out.
‘Hey, anyone in there?’
The sleeping bag did not move, so Hannah crouched down alongside it and gently pulled one edge aside.
The bag was empty, filled instead with blankets, presumably to keep them dry while the occupant was away begging, drinking, working or doing whatever they needed to do to survive another day on the streets. She surveyed the trash around the bag and figured that whoever was living here had not been gone too long. She spotted a Nandos takeaway carton, and tucked inside it was a half eaten meal and a receipt. Carefully, she pulled the receipt out and checked the date.
The night before.
Hannah stood and glanced up and down the river. There was no way to track down the person who owned the sleeping bag, and it was unlikely they would have any kind of identification on them, but dutifully she crouched down again and went through the sleeping bag.
The odours that emanated from the bag’s depths caused her to cough and take small breaks from her work until she was certain that there was nothing within that could identify the owner. Disgusted, she stood up and turned to leave, and it was then that she saw the seagull levitating over the water nearby.
The bird was not flying, but its head was peeking over the edge of the towpath as though it were hovering. Its beady black eyes watched Hannah, waiting for the chance to return to the abandoned Nandos container. Hannah looked again at the food. Suddenly it struck her as odd that someone without money would abandon food in such a way, long enough that animals could catch its scent and steal it from them.
She turned and walked toward the seagull. The bird watched her with a beady gaze for several seconds as though sizing her up, and then realised that she wasn’t going to stop. It burst into flight with a piercing cry and glided away across the river to land on a bank on the far side, watching once more as Hannah approached the water.
The river was flowing silently past as she reached th
e edge and peered down.
The water shimmered by, and below the surface she could see green reeds swaying gently back and forth with the flow of the frigid water. She caught her breath as within them she saw a wide–eyed face staring lifelessly back up at her, that of a man with his mouth also wide open, his skin burnished by exposure to too many harsh winters and scorching summers.
*
‘Any idea of identity?’
Detective Chief Inspector Stone stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets as he stared down at the body, frozen it seemed in time beneath the surface of the water. For the second time in two days the river swarmed with police and cordon tapes, media folks up on the bridges trying to get shots of the body before the forensics teams showed up with their tents to shield the gruesome job of recovery.
‘Nothing yet,’ Hannah replied. ‘We’re rounding up a few homeless from the town centre. Once they’ve sobered up enough, we’ll question them and see what they can tell us about the victim. Trouble is, they may know a name but so many of them use psuedonyms it might not be enough to identify him.’
Stone nodded but said nothing. Detective Harris looked up and down the river, his collar turned up against the wind.
‘I’m guessing most folks don’t come down here at night, unless they have to.’
‘Locals avoid it,’ Hannah confirmed. ‘We can check the cameras again to see what happened, see if anyone else came down here, but in the shadow of the bridge and from the other side of the water I’m not sure we’ll get much.’
‘Check them anyway,’ Stone advised. ‘At best we might be able to establish a timeline. What bothers me is that this is the second body we’ve pulled from the water here and the third such incident in a week. It puts the Sam Lincoln case in a whole new light.’
Hannah nodded, although she didn’t like where the case was heading.
‘It’s as likely that they’re connected as not,’ she suggested.
Stone frowned. ‘Two unidentified men murdered, another man shot and missing and a detective wounded, all attacked in almost the same location? Unless you can connect this man to Samuel Lincoln, Rebecca Kyle or the other victim we pulled from the river, we’re up a creek without a paddle here. These could be the acts of a random killer.’
