“I’m glad to hear it,” I said, surprised and a little touched that Rashford had recommended me.
“It seems like you’re in the best position to proceed with this if you’re up for it.”
“Aye, I’ll do my damnedest.”
Ross glanced over at Snell, who had a frown on his face. I wasn’t sure if it was from the pain he was in or if it was disapproval over the idea of me taking up where he’d left off. With him rumbled, we didn’t have a whole lot of choice, though, unless LACS trusted me so little that they’d rather bring in someone completely brand new and go back to square one.
Besides, I wasn’t quite sure how far their powers extended and whether they actually could stop me from going forwards. The police, LACS, and the RSPCA had a history of working together to each other’s benefit, but at the end of the day, I was a police officer and not an employee of an animal charity. Still, it was better to use honey than vinegar, and Ross seemed warier than completely opposed to me being involved, especially now that Rashford had weighed in with her good opinion.
“Are you trying to get anyone new in there?” I asked after a pause, wondering if there would be anyone on the inside who I’d be able to talk to when, or if, I managed to get any deeper into the dogfighting organisation.
“It’s too hot right now, so we’ve backed off,” Ross said, sounding slightly bitter.
“Too dangerous,” Snell added heavily, and I just nodded. With his serious injuries in evidence, it wasn’t hard to believe how dangerous this could get if it went wrong.
“Well, I made some good progress today with the bloke I know, the one who used to be my mate,” I said, taking a sip of coffee to wet my throat. “I’m certainly inexperienced, but I don’t think the situation’s hopeless.”
“Don’t underestimate them.” Snell moved slightly in bed, and a grimace of pain crossed his face.
“I won’t,” I assured him.
I tried very hard not to let thoughts of my dad at a dogfighting event or doing business with one of them get in the way of my resolve. For the first time, I was almost glad that his sudden death had happened when it did because who knew what types of serious crime he could’ve got himself into if he hadn’t died. Selfishly, I almost wished that I’d never gone looking for more information on him so that my memory of him wouldn’t have been marred with that particular black mark, not that his memory hadn’t already been murky and smudged. But at least I’d never had to face the physical proof that he’d been caught at a dogfighting ring, nor got himself into anything more serious and been sent to jail for it. His death had most likely spared me that, at least.
“This old mate of yours, how much do you know about him?” Ross questioned. Snell looked interested too, or as interested as he could be when he was in pain and hopped up on meds, no doubt.
After making sure that the door to Snell’s private room was properly closed, I gave them all the relevant information on Matt Hartley and Phil Berry that I had.
“This is Phil,” I said, bringing my phone over to Snell’s bedside to show him the photo off his Facebook page. I’d already shown Ross, and she’d just shaken her head.
“Don’t know him,” Snell said. I pulled up Matt’s photo and showed him that one, my heart rate increasing when I saw Snell’s eyes widen slightly beneath his greying brows. “Hartley, did you say?” he said, frowning at the picture.
“Aye, I think he’s a bigger player, or at least he had his own dogs and seemed far more guarded to me.” I pulled back and gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Of course, he was just my dad’s friend, so he doesn’t trust me as much as Phil does.”
“But you found evidence that your dad was involved? So he’d be more inclined to bring you into the scene too, right?” Stephen put in. He’d raised his eyebrows when he heard what I’d discovered this afternoon, and I knew he’d want to talk about it, if not later today, then Monday.
“That’s what Phil seemed to think, yeah. He got excited when we found the magazines, so he’d clearly forgotten about them over the years. I don’t know whether Matt knew my dad was involved, though, and he might not believe me if I told him.”
“So you need this Phil bloke to tell him,” Snell put in. His gravelly voice had a way of making us all fall silent to listen to him. “It’s always better for information to come through people they already know, y’understand?”
“I don’t know that they know each other, though.”
“They’re in the same circle, and that’s what’s important. Phil has a genuinely illegal business going on, you said, correct?” Ross said.
“His garage, aye.”
“That’s good, then. Associating with people like that makes you more legitimate to them, do you see? You don’t want to be an unknown loner. You want them to think that you’re already a part of things and that others trust you. No one in their group will want to make the first move to trust you, but if Phil already has and Matt knows you, that’s crucial. It’s why it’s so difficult for us to get a stranger in because they’re so guarded.”
“I understand. I’ll see if I can get them to meet somehow, maybe at Phil’s garage or down the pub.”
“Good lad,” Snell said approvingly before settling back onto the bed with a sigh.
We talked for a while longer about our plans, but the nurse came in shortly after and ushered us out so that Snell could get some rest.
“Good luck,” he told me, reaching out to shake my hand with a surprisingly firm grip before I left. “I hope you do better than me,” he added, with a darkly humorous twist to his mouth.
“I’ll do my best,” I promised, meaning it when I said it.
Even if I wasn’t doing this for the animals that had been brutally mistreated, Snell deserved justice for his injuries, which might take months to heal from. The memory of his injuries and banged-up state would remain at the forefront of my mind for some time to come, a visceral reminder of the lengths to which these people would go in order to carry on doing their so-called sport. But that was the reason why I needed to risk it, because the types of people involved in dogfighting were the kind you didn’t want out on the streets, and because dogfighting was so often a gateway into some of the very worst than humanity could do. I might not be the best candidate for tackling that, but I was the best we had.
Fifteen
Stephen and I had driven to the hospital in separate cars, so we parted ways in the car park. Still, I wanted to talk to him about what had happened in the hospital, and when I was at Phil’s house, so I put my phone on speaker and called him. I pulled out of the car park once he picked up, and we talked idly as we drove back to Hewford.
“I’m sorry about your dad. Y’know, finding out about the magazines,” Stephen said.
I made a noise of acknowledgement in my throat. “Thanks. I mean, I should’ve expected it, really.”
“Seeing it confirmed is different.”
“I guess it is. I can picture him there at those fights, though. It’s not hard to imagine him fitting in. That was his kind of world.”
Stephen was silent for a pause, and there was just the sound of the car’s engine, the road’s rough tarmac under the wheels and the intermittent traffic outside.
“Don’t answer if you don’t want to, okay, but where was your mum in all this?”
The mention of my mum made me press my lips together, my hands tightening around the wheel. It was stupid, really, to still care about it now, decades after it had happened. Loads of kids came from broken homes and surely weren’t still hung up about it when they were past thirty. Still, thinking of her made my stomach twist, and I blew out a breath.
“She left when I was a kid. I didn’t understand at the time ‘cus no one explained it to me plainly, but I realised later that she must have got fed-up with dad’s ‘business’ deals. Maybe she expected him to go straight at some point, but he never did.”
“I understand,” Stephen said after a pause.
I bit back a sharp repl
y about how he couldn’t understand at all and forced my hands to relax. Even just talking about it made me edgy, but I told myself firmly that I wasn’t going to verbally lash out at him again.
He changed the topic back to what Snell and Ross had been telling us, and I gladly ran with it.
“We don’t even know where they’re keeping the dogs now,” I lamented.
The two LACS members had told us that the dogs had been moved shortly after Snell had been caught out, and LACS had been too focused on trying to get Snell out and keep him safe to be able to do a raid on the dog barn too.
“We’ll find them again,” Stephen said confidently.
“Aye, but how many of them will die in the meantime? Or be abused?”
“We can only do our best, Mitch. You’re already going above and beyond by taking this case on at all. It’s hardly a normal job for a DCI, is it? And you’ve seen how dangerous it is.”
“I’m giving it a shot, yeah, but a fat lot of good it’ll do if we can’t find some actual evidence and leads to follow up soon, though.” I sighed.
Stephen paused, and I knew him well enough to know that he had a thought or idea but was hesitating to voice it for whatever reason.
“Go on, mate,” I prodded him when he still didn’t speak.
“I don’t like to suggest it, but if your dad was involved…” he trailed off, and I tapped my fingers on my steering wheel impatiently.
“What?”
“You said your mum must’ve had some idea about it all, so maybe she could help,” he offered, a tentative note to his voice that said he knew this was a delicate subject.
“I mean, my dad was involved years back. I don’t know how relevant it’d be to our case,” I argued, trying to think rationally about his suggestion. My gut feeling was a strong and definite ‘no’.
“Your dad’s connection to the fighting may well give you an in, so isn’t it worth checking out?”
“I haven’t spoken to her in years, Steph,” I confessed.
“Alright, well, it was only an idea. No pressure.”
Stephen changed the subject again, but I wasn’t feeling much up to talking after that, and we called off. We weren’t too far from the station now, and I glanced at the time on the car’s dashboard. The sky was starting to turn dusky, but it wasn’t actually that late, and there’d still be a good bit of time to work at the station. I badly wanted to blow it all off and go for a long run, but I resisted.
Turning a corner, I frowned as I realised which part of the city I was in, and without thinking too closely about it, I took a sharp left towards the cemetery. It must have been over five years since I’d been there in a personal capacity and not because of work. I pulled the car up the driveway, and the familiar scene jogged my memory about the last time I’d been here. It’d been on my dad’s birthday, a good many years after he’d died, and I’d spent no more than ten minutes standing in front of his grave and not knowing what to say.
I had no more idea of why I was here now than I did then, but I parked the car up and climbed out. It took me a few minutes to find the spot where my dad was buried, but I located his grave before too long. Like Phil had mentioned, it’d become overgrown and neglected over the years without a relative to clean it up. Whoever mowed the cemetery grass and trimmed the hedges must not have had the time or was paid enough to clear up around the graves as well.
I pulled away some of the bigger weeds from the base, running a hand over the gravestone itself. It was a plain thing and nowhere near the quality of some of the stones in the older part of the cemetery, which would stand tall and remain legible for probably a hundred years or more.
Phil was right. My dad probably would’ve wanted something smarter and more expensive as a testament to his sense of his own grandeur and his irrepressible ambition, even though he’d passed before he managed to make much of it. He should’ve got a real job and put away some savings like everyone else if he wanted a better legacy, I thought with a shot of bitterness.
Just the same as when I’d been here before, my attempt to focus on the better memories of my dad failed after a while, with old hurts rising up. The revelation that he had been involved in the brutal world of dogfighting meant that my feelings were more complicated than ever. I released a sigh and touched my dad’s gravestone briefly before I left.
There was work still to do at the station, but I was already anticipating my run later on. The sky looked cloudy but not particularly threatening, so I had my fingers crossed that it would stay clear this evening. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do more right now than to go on a good, hard run, taking my frustration and hurt out on the pavements and leaving it all behind for a while.
Getting up on Saturday morning took a lot of effort after the killer run I’d done the night before. I hobbled and limped my way over to the kitchen, muttering curses under my breath as I went, where I got the kettle on and started stretching out my sore legs. I grumbled all the while, wincing at how they’d seized up overnight, as I seriously regretted flopping into bed last night without doing any sort of a warm-down.
A soup-bowl sized cup of coffee and a good deal of stretching later, I was feeling more human. At the least, I could walk around the kitchen without swearing, which was progress. It was a good job that I didn’t have anything specifically booked in for today, I thought, other than the call with Sam that we’d planned for this evening. I was hoping that we could spend a good few hours together, making a meal over video chat or laughing over a movie together. On work days, I was usually busy enough that the ache of missing her wasn’t quite so terrible, but it really hit hard on the weekends.
Stretching my arms up above my head with a grimace, I headed off to the shower, wondering what I should do with the day. Normally the weekends were for catching up on chores, exercising, and possibly going out for a beer with Stephen. I could have called Phil and tried to further the case, but I felt badly in need of a day where I could let my guard down a little and relax.
As I soaped my hair up in the blissfully hot shower, my fingers caught in my knotty curls and made me wince. Everything that had happened this week with Phil and finding out about my dad must have brought the past to the forefront of my mind because a memory popped up that I hadn’t thought about in years.
I’d loathed my hair as a lad, wanting to crop it as short as possible to get rid of the curls that made me different from the other boys. They had called me nicknames like Curly Wurly that hadn’t been particularly kind, and I’d been fed up with my mum having to tug a comb through my hair every morning in an attempt to make me look marginally presentable. So I’d taken the kitchen scissors to my hair one afternoon after school and hacked the whole lot as thoroughly and messily as only an eight-year-old could manage. My mum had walked in just as I was finishing and burst into tears when she saw me.
Discomforted by the old memory, I frowned as I dipped my head under the water, roughly rinsing my hair out. I grew my curls out longer these days, not least because Sam was fond of them, and I didn’t hate them like I had once. What would Mum think if she saw me now? I wondered.
Stephen had put the idea of going to see her in my head, and it continued to bug me as I finished up in the shower. It stayed in my head, too, as I spent the morning doing chores and putting the apartment to rights, not that I ever let it get particularly messy. I ate lunch apathetically, flicking through my phone as I did so. I had a number for my mum in my contacts, but I didn’t even know if it was her current one.
After I’d completely cut her out of my life in my twenties, I’d barely spoken to her since. She used to send birthday and Christmas cards to my dad’s house, which the new owners passed onto me for a short while. Then the cards stopped, either because I never replied and she gave up or because the homeowners didn’t want to be forwarding on my post for me anymore. I’d been so busy with adjusting to the police force and working my butt off to make ends meet back then that I’d hardly even questioned it. And no
w, because I’d let the last thread connecting us snap all those years ago, I might not be able to reconnect us now even if I wanted to.
Pushing my half-eaten lunch aside, I balled up my courage and tapped on her contact in my phone. Either it’d be the wrong number, or no one would answer, or she would pick up the phone but not want to talk to me, and that’d be that. Still, my heart was beating hard as I listened to the phone ring in my ear. So far, so good, I thought as I dragged a hand through my damp hair.
“Hello?”
Even after all this time, I recognised her low voice instantly, and it made my heart ache. She’d smoked for years before she had me, and there was a lingering rasp to her voice that I recognised instantly, even though she’d quit cold turkey when I’d been born. With how tight my throat felt, my voice probably sounded as rough as hers when I finally managed to spit out the words for a response.
“Hi, Mum,” I said, swallowing down the lump in my throat.
There was a silence heavy enough to make me hold my breath as I waited for her to speak again. I heard a sharp inhale from her end and pressed my fingers to my mouth as I found myself hoping against hope that she wouldn’t just put the phone down. I’d done so well ignoring my past that I’d really thought I didn’t care that I didn’t have a relationship with her, pretending that because I’d cut her off by choice that it didn’t hurt. Hearing her voice proved me to be so wrong it was almost laughable, and yet I had no idea whether she felt the same.
“Mum?” I prompted worriedly after another unbearable second of silence.
“I’m here, I’m here,” she rushed to say. “God, Darren, I can’t believe it’s you.”
She didn’t sound angry, just shocked, so I released a huff of relieved laughter.
“Aye, it’s me.”
“Oh, Darren. You sound older,” she said softly.
“You sound exactly the same as I remember.”
She chuckled quietly. “I don’t look the same, I promise you that.”
Moving Target (A DCI Thatcher Yorkshire Crimes Book 6) Page 17
