Safe

by Jane Adams

  It was late enough in the afternoon for dusk to be closing in as Clarke drove onto the muddy patch that would eventually be the driveway. Petra, spotting that there was room for her to get down the other side of the house, drove round to the back of the property and turned the car back to face the road again.

  “Just in case,” she told Lauren.

  Lauren nodded. “Not a place I’d have chosen,” she said. They got out of the car and watched as Clarke walked round to join them. “I wish there was more light. I want to see what’s out there.”

  A third car had driven in and parked in the unmade road. Three men got out. “Armed police,” Petra said.

  “Better to be safe,” Clarke told her.

  “If you say so.”

  “Shall we go inside?”

  They followed him through the back door. The armed officers had spread out. Lauren was envious of their torches. She stood in the doorway, watching closely as they examined the perimeter, noting that there was a wheelie bin outside the back door which, placed on its side, would just about allow her to scramble over the fence.

  “There’s food,” Clarke said. “Gas for the cooker hasn’t been connected yet, but there’s an electric hotplate and a microwave.”

  One of the armed officers had come through into the kitchen. “This is . . . Pete. He’ll be staying in the house tonight. One of the other two will be stationed in their vehicle and the third will alternate with him on patrol. By tomorrow, we should have a clearer picture of what’s happening. It’s going to be OK, Lauren.”

  “Is it?” She studied “Pete” carefully. A tall, heavily built man with a sharp haircut, he looked to Lauren as though he might be ex-military. She knew the type. Her dad employed enough of them.

  She left the kitchen and went off to familiarize herself with the rest of the house. Beds had been made up in two of the rooms. The windows had been locked and Lauren could find no keys. The landing window wasn’t designed to be opened. Rats in a trap, Lauren thought.

  She went back downstairs to find that “Pete” was loitering in the hall, evidently waiting for her to reappear. She ignored him, examined the downstairs rooms. TV, sofa, a stack of books and magazines. The room had obviously been hastily arranged and she wondered vaguely if they had taken the couch from one of the show homes. It had that “for show, not for comfort” look to it that she associated with posh lounges.

  The other two rooms were empty. One, she supposed, would be a dining room and the other a study or home office. On the windowsill of this room, she spotted what she had been searching for. A key to the window lock. Lauren breathed a sigh of relief and pocketed it.

  She returned to the kitchen. Petra was preparing sandwiches and listening as Clarke updated her. Lauren watched her face as he told her about Billy Hunter’s death. Petra didn’t give much away, but Lauren noted the slight tightening around her mouth that spoke volumes.

  “Did you like him?”

  “Like him? No, not really. But he was better than most.”

  “And he’s dead because of you.”

  “Lauren!” Clarke was shocked. “You don’t have to be—”

  “No, she’s right,” Petra told him.

  “It’s no good dressing it up,” Lauren returned. “People are dead because of what we’ve done and we have to live with that. Deal with it.”

  She turned on her heel and went off to inspect the house once again.

  Clarke watched her go. “And how is she dealing with all this?”

  “Better than I’d expect.” Petra sighed. “Look, we should all eat something. What about Pete and his friends?”

  “Just feed Pete for now. I’ll make sure the other two are sorted before I go.”

  Petra nodded and returned to her sandwich-making, taking refuge in what Lauren called her “normal”.

  Clarke went to see what Lauren was up to. He found her upstairs, stripping the two single beds. She glanced up at him. “Can you give me a hand?”

  “Sure, with what?”

  “I want to bring the mattresses down. I’m not sleeping up here.”

  “OK, and why’s that?”

  “The windows don’t open, so there’s no way out. Downstairs, there’s at least the two doors.”

  “Lauren, you don’t need to do this. You don’t need to worry—”

  She glared at him.

  “OK, I’ll help you. Grab that end and I’ll go backwards.”

  By the time they’d got the first mattress downstairs, food was ready. Pete sat down at the kitchen table with them and for the most part, they ate in silence. Clarke announced that he’d give Lauren a hand with the second mattress and then he’d better be off.

  “We’re sleeping downstairs?” Petra asked.

  “Windows are locked. Double-glazing’s hard enough to break and this place is triple-glazed.”

  “Fair enough,” Petra told her. “I’ve told Pete to lock the doors but leave the keys in place.”

  Lauren glanced over at the back door and nodded her approval. Clarke went a little later, leaving Petra and Lauren busy making up the beds in the living room. He checked in with the other two officers and called Superintendent Craig to update him, then drove away, knowing there was nothing more he could do but unable to shake the feeling that he should be doing more.

  Belatedly, he wondered if Lauren still had her gun. He should have taken it from her, should at least have insisted that Petra take charge of it. No, what I should have done is disarm her back when we first met. So why hadn’t he? And why hadn’t he even mentioned to his bosses that the girl had a gun?

  The answer to that was easy. Lauren’s paranoia had infected him, thoroughly and absolutely. And anyway, he reflected, was it really paranoia when the world really was out to get you?

  Chapter 46

  The next day seemed almost unreasonably calm. Clarke had finally managed a few hours’ sleep and a decent breakfast. More importantly, he turned up for work having showered and changed his clothes. He arrived to find his usual desk space had been divided between three newcomers and their computer equipment, and that Hopkins had jealously guarded a portion of her own workspace for his use.

  Clarke surveyed the room, attempted to count the bodies and gave up, speculating that they’d almost certainly exceeded fire regulations, packing so many into such a small space.

  There was a memo waiting for him on his bit of Hopkins desk, from the CPS, asking him to call a Miss Johnson about Miss Sykes’s case. It took him a moment and two readings of the note to realize that this was about Lauren Sykes’s possible involvement in Charlie Perrin’s death and yet another reading to realize that this was about Lauren being a possible witness to Charlie’s death. So which was it?

  Hopkins grinned at him. “Looks like the CPS are taking their lead from the tabloids. Fiancée kidnapped, husband-to-be shot trying to defend her honour or some such. What happens when they find out what really happened, do you think? Will she be charged, seeing as she actually did shoot him?”

  “It was self-defence,” Clarke said. “But for now, we go along with whatever the CPS think it is.”

  Hopkins looked amused. “It’s all getting a bit complicated, boss.” Then she glanced around the room and asked quietly, “What did Henderson actually do? I mean, we all heard you yelling at him, but—”

  “DCI Henderson is currently on leave,” he told her. “Just now, that’s all there is to it. I’d better give this Miss Johnson a ring.”

  Hopkins looked disappointed. “People are talking,” she said.

  “The rumour mill is always churning.”

  “But they’re saying that Henderson might be in deeper than . . . That there might be someone else implicated. You know, working for one of the OCGs.”

  Clarke frowned. “Who told you that?”

  She shook her head, looked embarrassed. “Just something I heard.” He waited, but she seemed reluctant to say any more about it. “You’d better make your phone call,” she told him. She plu
cked a folder from her desk and walked off with it.

  She looks uneasy, Clarke thought.

  Half an hour later, the Lauren Sykes problem still as tangled as ever, he was reporting to Craig.

  “Crenshaw’s organized the shift change at the house. His people. Ours will return this evening,” Craig told him.

  “Is that wise? I mean, the fewer people involved the better.”

  “You can’t leave the same officers on permanent deployment.”

  “And this way you get to share the overtime with another division,” Clarke commented.

  “Don’t you take that tone. If you’d handled this by the book, the girl would have been taken into protective custody long since. Formal statements would have been taken and arrests probably made. As it is—”

  “You’re not thinking of bringing her here?”

  “At some point, she’s going to have to be interviewed under caution and our undercover officer is going to have to answer for her part in all of this.”

  “But you can’t bring them here. Not yet.”

  “I wasn’t planning on bringing them here. Crenshaw’s organizing that end of things. The plan is that later on today, or possibly tomorrow morning, they’ll be taken to your old divisional headquarters and the initial interviews will take place there. We need leverage, Clarke. Time and tide are against us and we need their statements.”

  “I want to be present. Lauren and . . . Pat, they trust me.”

  “And apparently, you don’t trust us.” Craig let the statement hang. “Pat,” he said, “the undercover, is one of our own. I fail to understand your reluctance to reveal her identity. It’s only a matter of time before the whole world knows. You must be aware of that.”

  “Frankland didn’t tell you,” Clarke said. “I’m not going to be the one who does.”

  “I could have you suspended.”

  “And what good would that do?” He could see how angry Craig was becoming but all he felt right now was weary. True, Petra’s identity would soon be revealed and, he had to ask himself, did any of that matter now? Probably not, but as he’d just told Craig, he wasn’t going to give anyone anything they didn’t actually need. “I want to be there,” he emphasized.

  Craig looked as though he was about to object. Then he nodded. “Contact Crenshaw, make the arrangements.”

  * * *

  Back at the safe house, Lauren had watched the shift change closely. She’d not spoken to the other two and not had much to say to Pete. Their new Pete was a sandy-haired man whereas the first Pete’s hair had been brown but that apart, they seemed to have been poured into the same mould. She was restless, impatient, watching the news obsessively, channel-hopping until Petra eventually took the remote away and found a film. “God, look what I’ve found,” Petra said. Bruce Willis doing his thing yet again.

  They sat together on the uncomfortable, show house sofa and watched in silence as inside the Nakatomi tower Bruce Willis, stripped down to his vest, pulled shards of glass from his bare feet.

  “You OK?” Petra asked.

  Lauren lifted her hands to her face and wiped away the tears. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said.

  Chapter 47

  Sam Barker had been given her instructions. Go to the police station, as you agreed you would and tell the police officers that it was absolutely nothing. That nothing untoward had happened. That you had an argument with Marty, Carole intervened and whacked him in the face but that it’s all fine now.

  Sam had managed to get a couple of hours sleep after the doctor had given her painkillers and strapped her fingers up. She’d not intended to go to sleep, but sheer exhaustion had won and she’d been woken up just before nine by a young woman she vaguely recognized as being one of the kitchen staff. She had been sleeping on Carole’s bed in what had been Carole’s old room, but of Carole there was absolutely no sign. The girl who brought breakfast on a tray said that Mrs Josephs had left a couple of hours before and that Mr Perrin wanted to see her. “Mr John Perrin,” she had elaborated.

  Sam hadn’t wanted anything to eat, but she’d drunk the coffee gratefully. Before going downstairs for her meeting with John, she had padded along the corridor to the guestroom to see if the two women were still there. She’d found the same girl who’d brought her breakfast making the beds and she didn’t know anything about the two other women, only that the “guests” had left with Mrs Josephs that morning.

  So why hadn’t Carole woken her before she’d gone? Sam felt thoroughly hung-over and realized that the doctor must’ve given her something to make her sleep as well as something to kill the pain. She had found a little pack with some pills in it on the bedside table, her own name written on the label. They had been marked codeine, but feeling suspicious of this she had left them where they were. Her hand was throbbing now.

  Downstairs one of the men hanging around in the hallway had directed her to where John was waiting. He, too, had been having a late breakfast. Of Gus Perrin, there had been no sign. She had stood in the doorway and waited to be told what to do next, then had noticed that a suitcase, evidently taken from the house she had shared with Marty, had been placed on a chair alongside her handbag. She’d completely forgotten about her bag, but then remembered that she must have left it at Carole’s cottage.

  John had finally glanced up from the newspaper. From where she’d been standing, Sam had seen a picture of Lauren Sykes and the woman Sam had known as Pat on the front page. John had tossed it across the table towards her.

  “Make no mistake,” he’d told her. “They’ll be found and dealt with. Now, my sister has a soft spot for you and, as it turns out, we’re prepared to draw a line. Carole promised you money — that’s been transferred into your account in lieu of notice, and there’s a phone number for you to ring if you need more. Like I say, my sister has a soft spot for you. Marty’s fucked off, so you can forget about him. So what you’re going to do now is you’re going to go down to the police station, like you promised you would last night, and tell them nothing was wrong. And then you’re going to piss off. Don’t care where. You understand.”

  Sam had nodded. She understood all right. “Where’s Carole?”

  “Gone away for a bit of a holiday. Not that it’s any of your business now.”

  And at that, she had been dismissed. A car had been waiting and she had been frightened for a moment about where it was going to take her. But it had simply driven her to the police station, stopped outside and the driver had told her to get out. And so here she was, sitting in an interview room, ready to give her account of what was supposed to have happened the night before.

  The problem was, Sam was not about to do that. Her hand was still throbbing and she used that pain to give herself courage.

  “I was supposed to come here this morning and tell you that it’s all fine. That nothing happened last night, just a misunderstanding. But that bastard broke my fingers. That fucking bastard broke my fingers. So if he thinks I’m going to do what he tells me . . .”

  There were two offices in the room with her and one was DS Hopkins. Hopkins excused herself for the tape, left the room and called Clarke, wanting to know what the hell she should do next.

  Clarke was on his way to visit Petra and Lauren. He debated about turning around and following her into the interview room. “Take a statement, I’ll sort it out when I get back,” he decided.

  Chapter 48

  Clarke called on them and told them about the interviews under caution. “Craig wanted them to happen today,” he said, “but events have run a bit ahead of us, so they’ll begin first thing tomorrow.”

  “What events?”

  “Sam Barker type events. You remember her?”

  “Carole’s assistant. Yes, of course. Is she OK?”

  “She’s more or less fine, I suppose, seeing as how our definitions of ‘fine’ are a bit flexible at the moment. She walked into the police station this morning, said she’d come to make a statement about an alleged domestic
we’d attended last night. She has two badly broken fingers on her left hand and was dropped off at the police station in a car registered to one of Perrin’s employment agencies. It’s likely Gus Perrin intended this as just more mud in the water. She’s being statemented as we speak, but I’m not sure she’s going to stay on message.” He relayed what little Hopkins had told him. “The same night you disappeared, her boyfriend, Marty, walked into divisional HQ and made a statement to the effect that Perrin had sent men to beat him up and take Sam away. The officers sent to the Perrin place were persuaded there was nothing amiss. I’m guessing Sam was sent in to corroborate the Perrins’ story, but she’s tougher than they thought.”

  “She always struck me as independently minded. What about Marty? Is he OK?”

  “Not a clue. He left divisional headquarters, got a taxi to the railway station, and we’re hoping CCTV will give us some idea where he went after that.”

  “As far away as possible, if he’s got any sense.” She frowned. “It’s going to be tough on him, though. He had a job he loved and a relationship that kept him happy.”

  “And a boss capable of turning violent at the drop of a hat, though when I spoke to him, he’d seemed to be almost enjoying the fact.”

  “Anything about my dad?” Lauren hadn’t spoken until now.

  “Last seen at the Perrins’ farm.”

  Lauren nodded as though that made sense. “Dad wanted me to marry Charlie,” she said. “But the thing is, he saw that as a way of keeping control. Keeping something, at least. Gus Perrin had been putting a whole load of pressure on. Buying up shares in Dad’s legitimate businesses, moving in on his territories . . . It had taken Dad a while to realize, I think. He thought it was new people moving in, but eventually he realized it was the Perrins.”

  “So he figured better to be married to the mob than eradicated by them,” said Clarke. That made sense of a lot of things. “And how did the Perrins feel about this arrangement?”