Dead and Gone

by D. L. Michaels

  There’s a man in a suit, standing back from the front door, looking up at the bedroom windows, then over at me.

  He sees me and sees that I’ve seen him. He’s middle-aged, official-looking, possibly a policeman. My heart sinks. I suspect someone’s decided to charge me with something after all.

  As I head to the door, I feel inappropriately dressed, as I’m barefoot and wearing paint-stained grey track pants and a Simpsons sweatshirt that has a picture of Bart shouting out, ‘No way!’

  I open up, keeping the security chain on the door. ‘Can I help you?’ I ask a thickset man with curly dark hair and deep brown eyes.

  ‘I’m looking for Martin Johnson.’

  ‘And you are?’

  He dips a hand into the jacket of his grey suit and produces a business card. ‘I’m Finnian Docherty, a private investigator, retained by your wife.’

  I take the card, read it and hand it back. ‘She’s not my wife. As a private investigator, you should already know that.’

  ‘Can I come in, please, Mr Johnson? There are a couple of matters that are probably better discussed inside.’

  ‘Such as what?’ I answer, suspiciously.

  ‘Such as the monthly payments you make to a numbered Swiss bank account and a woman called Helen Wood.’

  The mention of her name is like a punch in the stomach. I push the door shut, unfasten the chain and open it up again.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He walks past me and into the hall, waiting while I shut the door and lead the way into the lounge. I pick up the remote control and turn off the TV. ‘Excuse the mess.’

  He smiles and waits to be asked to sit down.

  ‘Please, sit down.’ I gesture to an armchair by the fire, the only seat that isn’t covered with papers, magazines or washing I haven’t yet got around to ironing and sorting out.

  I sit on the sofa and gather my wits. ‘So why is Helen of interest to you – and presumably Sarah?’

  He gives me a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m not just a business associate of your wife’s. I’m a friend. And I know her well enough to say that I believe you mean everything to her. More than anything she wishes you two could get back together.’

  I shift uncomfortably. Push myself defensively back against the sofa arm and cushions. ‘As I said before, she’s not my wife. Sure, she pretended to be, but she’s not.’

  ‘But she wishes she was, and deep down, I suspect you wish she was as well.’ He pauses to see if I argue, then when I don’t, he continues, ‘I know you’ve been paying cash into a Barclays account in your name, and making monthly transfers to a numbered account in Switzerland. I know that account is owned by a woman called Helen Wood, who lives in Geneva and works for the World Health Organization. Before I tell the police what I know, I thought it worthwhile finding out why you wanted to keep these payments secret.’

  I feel strangely nervous. On one hand, I want to tell him. On the other, I’ve kept the reason private so long that speaking about it doesn’t come easily.

  ‘I’m not trying to hurt you – or anyone else, Mr Johnson. To the contrary,’ he says, in a very believable tone. ‘I’m trying to avoid raking up something that might have no relevance to my client, or any of the charges against her.’

  ‘It’s relevant,’ I concede. ‘At least, it’s something Sarah should know about. Something I should have told her – told her long ago.’

  ‘Then tell me. Tell me now.’

  He’s looking at me with policeman eyes, the kind that keep you hooked, that leave you with nowhere to run and hide. ‘I was at university with Helen. We were a couple.’

  ‘Which university?’

  ‘Cambridge. I did Art, she did Medicine. We become lovers. Lived together. Graduated. Broke up.’ I feel embarrassed and look away from him. ‘I was a bit of a tosser back then, played around a lot, if you get what I mean.’

  ‘You were a young man, free and single,’ he says, sympathetically.

  ‘Too free. Anyway, Helen called me some weeks after we’d split and said she wanted to meet up. We did, and we had sex. I had another partner then, and she did as well. Despite this, we saw each other on and off for about the next year, and became what people now call “friends with benefits”.’

  ‘Casual sexual partners.’

  ‘I prefer my terminology. Anyway, you can probably guess what happened next.’

  ‘She got pregnant?’

  ‘Right in one. Course, I did all that “how do you know it’s mine and not his?” stuff. Then I made it clear I wanted nothing to do with the child, that all I would pay for was an abortion. She agreed. I wrote a cheque for five hundred quid, that’s all I could afford, and thought that would be the end of the matter.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’

  ‘No. She decided to have the child. And after the birth, she sent me pictures of the baby.’

  ‘And you sent her money? That’s what the payments were?’

  ‘Yes. But it’s not like it seems. She didn’t want money. I had to insist on it. Once the child was born, I felt responsible for it. I felt awful that I’d asked for her to abort it, and now it was flesh and blood, I had a responsibility, right?’

  His face remains impassive. ‘Are you sure it’s yours?’

  ‘Yes. I might be soft but I’m not stupid. I insisted on a DNA test. It confirmed I was the father.’

  He nods, and I can tell he’s now starting to make sense of it all. ‘So, she accepted the money from you, but then she married and ended up in Switzerland somehow?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s called Luca Burkhalter. She married him a year after the birth and they both went to live and work in Switzerland. I promised to pay her a sum each month until Florian reaches eighteen. It goes into an account linked to her maiden name. She wanted to keep it separate from her family affairs. Her new family.’

  Docherty leans towards me and rests his elbows on his knees. ‘Why didn’t you tell all of this to Sarah?’

  I recoil in horror at the thought. ‘How could I? How could I tell someone who told me she couldn’t have children, which is what Sarah said when I raised the prospect of us having kids, that I had a secret son?’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Yes, she did. I guess now that it was a lie. That she was on the pill, or using something. So how could I have told her about Florian? When would have been the best time to have had that conversation?’

  ‘It would have been difficult,’ he concedes.

  ‘Well, I’m not good at difficult,’ I confess. ‘I run from difficult every time I see it coming.’

  Docherty interlocks his hands and cracks his knuckles, while he thinks up his next question. ‘So what was your plan? Just hope to keep everything secret until your boy reached eighteen?’

  ‘Yes, that was it. Nothing more sophisticated than that.’

  ‘And now?’

  I shrug. ‘I guess I just carry on paying and Helen keeps raising Florian as she was doing.’

  ‘I mean with regard to Sarah. If she were here now, would you tell her what you’ve just told me?’

  The thought is too much to take in. ‘I don’t know. It’s impersonal telling you. We’re not emotionally tied.’

  ‘I understand.’ He gets to his feet and straightens his suit. ‘You do know that I am going to have to tell her, don’t you?’

  ‘I imagined you’d have to.’ I start to walk him to the door. ‘Please ask her not to make things difficult for Florian. He’s happy, apparently, and I’d hate to think of his world being turned upside down and him getting to know about me and all this mess over here.’

  Docherty gives me a nod of assent, fastens his jacket and disappears into the night.

  113

  Annie

  It’s late at night and I’m standing in front of the bedroom mirror, naked, studying the various bruises and scars all over my body. Like tattoos, they all have their own stories. Moments of foolishness, boldness, regret and bravery. The earliest is a bottle
wound to my left forearm, incurred while making a Friday night arrest of drunks during my first week out of Hendon. The latest are the purple and black patches spreading across my chest, the points where, but for ballistic armour, three nine-millimetre bullets would have burst bone and flesh and taken my life. I run my hands gently over the sickly coloured skin and I think about Dee and her scars – about the raw, sore skin where the surgeon’s knife has hopefully chased all trace of cancer from her body. I think about how they have mercifully saved her nipples and how she’s so amused by the fact that she has to rub them with nitroglycerine to keep them healthy. She’s sleeping now. A deep, tired sleep. A healing sleep. Tom and Polly are also ‘away in the land of nod’, as my late husband Jack used to say.

  I’ve been given family permission to go into work and watch the raid on the luxurious home of Janjira Chaiprasit and Ashley Crewe. I leave my more modest domicile as quietly as I can, and make the journey without the car radio on. I need some peace. A little space in my mind before another stage of the investigation begins.

  The offices at Police HQ are always cold at the weekend because the heating timers run Monday to Friday, so I have layered up in a thermal vest, black and grey asymmetric striped sweatshirt and black boyfriend jeans and boots.

  When I arrive, I find Nisha and DCI Goodwin in an operations room, with a bank of TV monitors, flasks of tea, coffee and hot water. While we say our hellos, Benny Watts, our tech engineer, points remotes at various screens and mutters alien words such as HDMI and RGB.

  ‘There we are!’ he says triumphantly. ‘You are good to go!’ He hands Goodwin a remote control the size of a police baton. ‘Don’t press that, that or that. This is for sound. That’s for picture-in-picture, but you’re best just letting their output play on the four separate screens. There’s only one-way sound, so if you want to talk to them you’ll need to use a landline. Anything else, I’ll be on my extension.’

  ‘Thanks, Benny.’

  Within minutes, a loud bleep pierces the room. Screens that were filled with vertical colour bars now show live video feeds from the helmet cams of four Thai police commandos.

  ‘What time is it in Phuket?’ I ask.

  ‘Coming up to six a.m.,’ says Goodwin. ‘That’s the strike time.’

  We hear hushed voices and the crunch of boots on gravel. All the pictures are infrared. It’s easy to see the beach house, pool, patio furniture and large French windows as the team makes its approach.

  My eyes dart across all four screens, marked with white tape as OFFICER 1, OFFICER 2, OFFICER 3 and OFFICER 4.

  All four of them stop. ‘They’re waiting for the strike command,’ says Goodwin.

  The camera of OFFICER 3 shows a man with a sledgehammer smash open the front door.

  There’s a blinding explosion of light. So bright that it almost burns out the screens.

  OFFICER 2 is first into the building. He heads down a corridor. We see him bang open a door that leads into a study. His camera sweeps around over a desk and bookshelves. OFFICER 4 storms into a bedroom. His camera sweeps left and right. There’s a king-size bed. Two figures. One male awake and sitting up. One female, head on the pillow just stirring from sleep. I walk closer to the screen.

  Is it Ashley Crewe?

  The main light comes on. The infrared switches over and the image comes through in full colour.

  It isn’t Crewe. It’s a man in his sixties. Asian. Bewildered. Frightened. The woman sits up. She’s the same kind of age. Holds tight to the man.

  OFFICER 1 enters another bedroom. Dark, grainy shapes fill the screen. Blurry verticals that could be anything – an open closet door, a curtain at a window, a dressing gown on a peg.

  A gunshot booms out.

  The noise is unmistakable.

  As is the flash of light on the infrared lens.

  OFFICER 1’s helmet cam swings up at the ceiling. It arcs sideward and stops, leaving a canted view of a wall and ceiling.

  He’s been hit.

  Bare feet run past the camera.

  The mic on his body cam picks up short, desperate rasps of breath.

  There’s shouting all around him.

  Urgency and panic crackles on police radios.

  More gunshots. Automatic fire.

  Our eyes switch screens.

  OFFICER 4 enters the same room. He’s shooting. Glass shatters. A window to the patio by the pool is blown out. Police arc lights illuminate the outside of the beach house. Bullets zip across the pool at fleeing figures. Gunfire is returned on the strike team.

  My eyes jump back to OFFICER 1.

  He isn’t moving.

  I’m hoping he’s unconscious, not dead.

  Someone’s rolled him onto his back.

  A hand reaches down to find a neck pulse.

  ‘That’s a car!’ shouts Nisha. I glance to a third screen. A 4x4 hurtles down the driveway towards large iron gates.

  ‘What odds that Crewe and Janjira are in that vehicle?’ asks Goodwin.

  A Royal Thai Police van reverses across the exit. The SUV slews over a lawn and smashes through dense hedging. ‘He’s getting away,’ shouts Nisha.

  My eyes jump from screen to screen. The helmet cams are too far away to see the BMW. I voice all our fears. ‘Crewe’s gone. I just bloody well know he has.’

  Goodwin snatches up the landline phone. ‘I’m calling Sirisopa.’

  Nisha and I watch the screens. The three active helmet cams are all outside and show clusters of men in assault uniforms. There are pointing hands. Raised rifles. One of the team runs off across the gardens. His absence opens up a view of the pool. It’s lit from beneath and floating in it is a man’s body, dressed only in shorts. ‘I’m guessing that’s one of Crewe’s security detail,’ I say to Nisha.

  ‘It’s ringing out,’ says Goodwin. ‘Sirisopa’s probably too busy to pick up right now, but it’s worth a try.’

  A mobile ringtone is heard on the monitor.

  Our eyes switch to the top left screen. OFFICER 1’s helmet is off. It’s on the ground, lens pointing upwards. A face peers into the camera as a hand picks up a phone and says ‘H’lo?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ says Goodwin. ‘It’s Sirisopa who’s been shot. He’s Officer One.’

  114

  Danny

  The reason why I spent last night in a police cell was that I feared hitting the booze again. Had I gone home, then I’m sure I’d have had a few to take off the edge. And then I’d have been back at square one. There’s an old saying in AA: ‘One drink is too many and a thousand are not enough,’ and I’ve never felt it truer than right now.

  This morning a duty doctor gave me some Naltrexone to help me detox and deal with the sweats and shakes. I know I’ll need to drink gallons of water, partly to flush my system but mainly to kid my dependent brain that I’m drinking booze.

  Coppers are usually lazy. Anything for an easy life. But not my copper. DC Eager Beaver Megan Billen has been in since the crack of dawn and already has me back in the interview room and under caution.

  ‘Mr Smith,’ she says, ‘you asked to stay voluntarily in custody last night, after admitting to chronic alcoholism. You have been seen this morning by a police doctor and certified fit to be interviewed. But for the sake of the tape, can you please confirm that you feel able to continue?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m all right to carry on.’

  ‘Then let’s begin. Yesterday, you intimated that you had information in relation to the Ashley Crewe enquiry that the investigatory team was unaware of. Is that what you’re referring to?’

  ‘Yeah. I do. But with you not being part of that team, will you know what I’m talking about?’

  ‘I’ve been fully briefed, Mr Smith.’ She puts her hand on a file to the left of her. ‘Assume that I know everything any officer from the main enquiry team would know.’

  ‘All right, then. Kieran Crewe, that’s Ashley’s brother, went down for killin’ a bloke called Adam Sage. You lot probably suspected Sage belong
ed to some crime gang called the Appletons, and you’d be right. He did. He was their main enforcer. Kieran killed him right in front of Brodie Appleton, the big boss, and he did it as a show of strength to Brodie’s lads Michael and Sean. It was the Crewe way of sayin’ to them that we’re afraid of nothin’ and no one. It said we’ve killed one of your top men and we’ll kill you if you don’t get the fuck off our turf. And they did. The Appletons gave the Crewes a free run in the Midlands after that.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the next bit. Probably the missin’ link for you lot. There was this bloke, a skinny git, who used to come to my stall, let’s say to “collect things”, on behalf of Raurie Crewe. He toured the country collecting money for Raurie, and dropping off supplies too, if you get my drift.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, this bloke collected money from me to pay Raurie. And one night we got very pissed and shared stories, as you do. Turned out he was an accountant what got made redundant from some factory and he liked a bit of gear to liven things up. Anyway, once Raurie found this out, he took him on, had him do the family’s books in return for drugs.’

  ‘And what was this ‘skinny git’s’ name?’

  ‘Ellison. Andy Ellison. Like I said, he was their original bookkeeper, if you like. Handy Andy knew all their secrets.’

  ‘You are aware that Mr Ellison is dead, aren’t you?’

  It’s news to me. Throws me for a sec. ‘No, I wasn’t. What happened? Did he overdose or somethin’?’

  She looks in her file. Pulls out a paper. ‘Apparently, he had a stroke, problems with the blood supply to the brain.’

  ‘That’s a fuckin’ shame.’

  We stare at each other without sayin’ another word, for what seems like ages, then she goes fishin’ again, ‘Is there anything else you can tell us, Mr Smith?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, no, there’s not. I’ve got nothin’ more to tell, but I’ve got a question.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘I’ve told you about the passport I gave Ashley – that’s an offence, right? What I did there, lettin’ him mess with it, that’s fraud or somethin’, right?’