by Adam Carter
“You want me to help you do what exactly?”
“Put him away for a long time.”
Thompson considered that. When she had taken the assignment from WetFish, she had the option of either killing Stenning or making sure there was enough evidence to get him sent down. Finding the man despicable, she had chosen the former. But perhaps that had been the wrong decision. Perhaps she had allowed her emotions to cloud her reason and she should have settled for a prison sentence. Since there was no way she could kill him now, that prison sentence was a very attractive consolation.
But then she thought of Sanders. As things stood, there was little chance she would be taken back by him. If she worked the case with DI Harrison she would almost certainly destroy even the slim chance she presently had. But since that slim chance was mainly in her imagination, she could not see it would hurt too much. Besides, doing the right thing was paramount here. Thompson’s job didn’t make all that much difference to anyone but herself, yet if she could prevent Stenning from assaulting even one more girl she would at least have done something right.
“What did you have in mind?” Thompson asked.
“That’s where I’ll need your input. Just remember, I outrank you. I’m in charge.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Here.”
Thompson frowned at the shoebox being handed her. Opening the lid, Thompson’s eyes widened as she found a cloth, within which was wrapped her knife.
“A token of trust,” Harrison said. “I don’t know who you are, not really, but I’m willing to trust you. I want you to trust me.”
Thompson replaced the lid, her body feeling lighter now. She felt whole again, complete, and suddenly regaining her job didn’t seem all that difficult. “So long as you want Stenning off the streets,” Thompson said, “I trust you, ma’am.”
“Then let’s go do something good.”
*
She was going straight back into the assignment, and in all honesty Baronaire had not expected any less. Thompson was a rare woman indeed, and Baronaire could not imagine what it would be like around the bunker without her. If she waited several hours his strengths would heighten, his abilities would kick in and he might be of some use to her. But Thompson would rush straight in to reclaim her honour. As Baronaire watched the two women depart, he decided he probably should not have been hiding behind a tree, watching them. If it was night, he would have had so many other ways to spy upon them without them being aware, but in pure daylight as he was he was receiving some strange looks.
Walking in the opposite direction of the two women, Baronaire had taken only three steps back in the direction of the station when he could see Detective Williams standing at the door, staring after his friend. Baronaire had to feel for the man. Williams and Harrison were both good officers and did not deserve to be played with like this. But upon Williams’s face there was also marked the glum decay of acceptance that he had done all he could. There was only so much a colleague and friend could do before he had to step away.
And upon thinking these thoughts, Baronaire realised Thompson neither wanted nor needed him. This was something she had to do without him: she had far too much to prove. As did Harrison. He had never got around to using the information Stockwell had provided him regarding her. It had not been something he had wanted to bring up during the interview because it had not felt right to him to exploit her in that way. Now he was glad he had not had to use the information. There was still something human about Baronaire after all.
Baronaire walked right past the station, although Williams did not see him. He was too caught up in concern for his friend. But there was nothing either man could do now for their colleagues. The closure of the case was down to those to whom that case had been officially assigned.
CHAPTER NINE
Her name was Jen Thompson. Harrison had told no one she had discovered the woman’s name, not even Williams. It was the tattoo that had given her away. Harrison had called dozens of people all around the country; eventually she had got lucky and spoken to a very old friend who remembered a detective with such a distinctive tattoo. She had not been seen in years, and Harrison’s contact believed she had resigned. But it seemed Detective Thompson had been reassigned: reassigned to the strange department few people spoke of and which no one believed in. But Harrison believed in it, simply because Detective Jen Thompson was still targeting criminals. Whether she was still a detective, Harrison could not say. She could not find her name in any official records, but knew that if her department was official there would be records somewhere. Just not ones Harrison had access to.
It was a frightening thought that someone might have the power to recruit detectives from all across the country, and she could only imagine how many others had similarly vanished.
But they were not Harrison’s secrets, and she was under the impression she should not have known them anyway. Thompson was focused, determined to stop Stenning, and that was all that mattered.
Presently the two women were hunkered behind a low wall, not doing much of anything. Thompson’s strange partner had radioed her to give them some information: he believed Stenning kept his drugs buried somewhere. Harrison had determined that if they could follow him to the stash they would have the evidence they would need for a conviction. They would still lack credible witnesses, but if they could analyse the drugs he used it would make the existing victims more believable.
They had been there for two hours now, watching Stenning’s flat and waiting for him to leave. Harrison’s stomach was rumbling, her legs ached and she had removed one shoe in order to run circulation back into her foot. Thompson showed no signs that she was at all uncomfortable, had not even noticeably shifted her stance in all that time. She was watching over the wall, almost unblinking, waiting for Stenning to appear.
It allowed Harrison to look at Thompson, to really look at her. She was still dressed in the tight jeans and high-cut top she had been arrested in the day before, and Harrison wished she knew what Thompson usually wore, just so she could fashion an honest picture of the woman in her head. Thompson had let her hair down by now, although the dark locks were matted and could have done with a decent brush running through them. She also didn’t smell too good, but even that was strange. It was a natural scent rather than an odour, as though Thompson was a wild animal and not a human being at all. Harrison had never been able to stand other people’s body odour, yet with Thompson it almost would have seemed strange for her not to smell this way.
“Would you stop that?” Thompson asked without taking her eyes from the flat.
“Stop what?”
“Smelling me.”
Harrison felt her face flush. “I wasn’t smelling you.”
“I’m good at reading facial expressions, and you most certainly were smelling me.”
“You can’t even see my face: you’ve been looking over that wall for hours.”
“I still know when people are assessing me, and I don’t like being assessed.”
Harrison shifted her weight once more to get comfortable. “Did you bring any food?”
“No.”
“Shame.”
“You’re in charge, remember.”
Harrison was certain she was joking, but they were both tense so she knew it would be best for them both of she didn’t respond to that remark.
“He’s here,” Thompson said, and all levity was drained from them as Harrison scrambled up to her side. Stenning was just coming onto the road. He had a large coat on, hands thrust into his warm pockets. He glanced both ways, perhaps expecting Thompson’s weird partner to be stalking him, before moving off across the street. The two women followed without a word to one another, keeping a discreet distance. He knew both of them by face and if he saw them this was all over before it began. They could not know of course that he was going for his drugs right now, but Harrison had a feeling Stenning might be intending to leave the city. At the moment he was a free man, without the p
olice having anything to pin on him. He had flaunted that freedom in the face of the law a lot lately and had almost been killed for it. Nor did Harrison doubt that Thompson’s partner had paid Stenning a not-so-friendly visit earlier. Stenning would not want to stick around and would try his luck elsewhere, perhaps returning once the police had ceased focusing quite so hard on him.
If he was idiot enough to remain here after everything that had happened, he would not have been clever enough to get away with as many crimes as he had.
A part of Harrison wanted to go to his flat to see whether he had a suitcase packed, but she would not lose sight of him now, not after everything she had been through. They kept pace with him but in all honesty Harrison had no idea where he was headed. She had done a lot of research into Stenning and knew more about him than even his parents. He did not have a garden, nor an allotment, but she knew that before long she would have all the answers she needed.
They trailed him for twenty minutes, during which time he hardly turned around at all, so focused was his mind on how much trouble he was in and how quickly he could try to get out of it. It was slowly becoming clear to Harrison where he was headed.
“He’s going to the rail-yard,” Thompson said, surprising Harrison with her knowledge of the local area. The rail-yard was a common name for an area of disused track. There had been an abandoned carriage there at one time, although after some kids had set fire to it the carriage had been removed. Now it was just an abandoned area of rock, dirt and what pathetic weeds forced their heads out of the ground.
It was also the perfect place for someone to bury something they didn’t want found.
Once they knew where he was headed, Harrison sent her companion along another route. If they could come at Stenning from two different angles they had a greater chance of stopping him from running. Harrison continued tailing him directly, and within five minutes he was scrambling down the slight rocky decline which led to the abandoned area. Harrison hung back at the top, looking around for Thompson and not seeing her anywhere. There were no people in this area, for they had left the road a couple of minutes back and no one came out this way. Harrison kept low, using a broken wall for cover, and watched as Stenning kicked around in the dirt for what he was after. Whether he had forgotten where his stash was buried, or whether he was just afraid, Harrison did not think he was in a good frame of mind for her to approach alone. She watched as he scrabbled in the dirt and retrieved a box. It was fairly large, considering it did not have to contain much. Again Harrison looked about for Thompson, although it seemed the other woman had got lost.
Steeling her nerves, Harrison stepped out and shuffled down the decline, never taking her eyes from Stenning. “Hold it right there. You’re under arrest.”
Shocked, Stenning almost fell over, although as he dropped the box Harrison’s heart caught in her throat as she realised what he had retrieved was not only a plastic jar of pills, but also something she had never connected him to before. Stenning’s hand wavered as he brought the rifle up, and Harrison ground to a halt several metres from him, her mind refusing to accept that this was even happening. She might have been able to accept that he could pull a pistol, but the rifle seemed entirely out of place in his hands.
“Calm down,” she said, seeing the fear in his eyes. But there was something else now as well: a stoicism born of actually being in control again. “Put down the gun, Stenning. Put it down now.”
“You don’t get to tell me what to do. I got women trying to drown me, men busting up my flat. I never had this before. Five years I’ve been doing what I’m doing and nothing like this has ever happened. Now suddenly everyone’s trying to kill me?”
“I’m not trying to kill you, Jack. How many times have you done it in five years?”
“What?” She could see he had not realised what he had just confessed to, but he did not panic. Not when he firmly believed he was at last in charge of things. Unfortunately, even if Thompson hadn’t disappeared, he would still have the upper hand against them. “Who cares how many times?” Stenning asked. “Who cares what I did to them? They weren’t exactly awake for it, so they can’t remember that much. I don’t see what some of them are complaining about.”
Harrison’s entire body tensed. She could feel he eyes narrowing, her fingernails digging into her palms. She had never understood people like Stenning. In all her years in the service, she had studied his kind, although seldom spoke with them. Most criminals had the decency to know what they were doing was wrong; they just didn’t care about it. But Stenning could not even accept he was scum.
“You’re destroying lives,” she told him: not because she thought he would listen but because so long as she was speaking he likely wouldn’t shoot her, and because she was so angry she knew she would explode if she didn’t speak. “You’re stealing a woman’s free will, you’re making them afraid to go outside their homes, let alone go back to nightclubs. Women aren’t your playthings; we’re not put on this Earth to amuse people like you, Stenning. Have you never stopped to think that women might have feelings, might have hopes and desires and dreams? And you shatter all those dreams in one night. You slip something into her drink, choosing the ones who have veered away from the company they came in with. Friends, lovers, single women looking for someone special: you don’t care who they are just so long as they’re coming home with you.”
Stenning raised his gun. “You got a chip on your shoulder. I don’t want to shoot you, but you can send me down for life, and a murder on top of that’s not going to do me much harm.”
“I can see a fault in your logic.”
“If I shoot you, there’s less chance of me going down at all.”
“Oh.”
“It’s a good job she gave me this gun. I didn’t want it, but she told me this might happen one day. That I might need the gun, and that I should keep it with my stash until I did.”
“Who? Your chemist?”
“You don’t get to ask any more questions, girl. I’m resisting arrest.” His eyes had turned manic by this point and Harrison knew everything had finally got to him. He had snapped, perhaps only momentarily, but it was a moment too long considering he was wielding a firearm and she was upon its other end.
The next second was the most important in Harrison’s life, but so many things happened it was as though the rest of her existence was packed into that single moment. Thompson appeared out of nowhere, her thin, metal baton slamming into the barrel of the rifle, forcing it down even as the shot exploded. Whether Stenning intended to fire was irrelevant, for he was too busy screaming at his broken hand, the bones shattered by the savageness of Thompson’s blow. In that same second, Thompson’s heel struck his knee, toppling the man, and even as he fell did Thompson smash her left fist into the side of his head.
Stenning was on the ground, wailing about his broken hand, in shock of everything that had happened so quickly.
Thompson stood over him, her baton held towards the ground, eyes focused on him to make sure he wasn’t about to pull some other trick. She wasn’t even breathing hard.
Able to breathe again, although her heart was still pounding, Harrison said, “You’ve done this before.”
“In my line of work, quite a lot actually. We don’t always have back-up. At least not on the simpler assignments.”
“You saved my life.”
Thompson shrugged. “We’re on the same team. I called your partner on my way here. He’s on his way to arrest Stenning.”
Harrison was almost lost for words. “After all the effort we put into this – first separately and then together – you’re giving the arrest to someone else?”
“It’s not about the arrests, ma’am. It’s about cleaning up the streets. I just figured I could buy you a coffee. Say thanks for everything.”
Harrison could see there was an ulterior motive in the woman’s eyes, and for that reason she almost declined. It would have been nice to part ways, each with the respect of the ot
her. Whatever Thompson wanted to talk about, Harrison knew she wasn’t going to like it. But they had worked well together and they had a result. At the very least Harrison owed her the talk, if that was what Thompson wanted.
“Sure,” Harrison said. She heard Williams pull up.
“You want to get a kick in before we leave?” Thompson asked. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Harrison smiled. “Maybe if he gets off again.”
Thompson returned her smile. It was strange, but she was actually beginning to warm to this woman.
CHAPTER TEN
True to her word, Thompson bought the coffee, and insisted they have some cake. They had found a small café just off the high street, where they were less likely to be disturbed. It wasn’t busy so they had found a table in a corner. Thompson had something she wanted to say, and knew Harrison would not appreciate it being spoken in company. They ate the cake first, Thompson keeping the conversation to small-talk so they couldn’t ruin the experience. They did not speak of Stenning, because he wasn’t worth talking about. Instead Thompson asked about Williams and Harrison asked about Baronaire, although of course there was nothing Thompson was really allowed to say about him.
“I notice you took down Stenning with a baton,” Harrison said as she sipped her drink. “Still not willing to confirm you’re in the police?”
“Best if I don’t.”
“And you certainly know how to use it. Thanks for not using the knife on him though.”
Thompson shuddered at the very idea. “That knife means a lot to me, ma’am. It’s about the only thing I have left of ... someone special to me. I don’t go around sticking it in people if I can help it, and I certainly wouldn’t sully it on a jerk like Stenning.”
