‘I read it, of course. But, as your friend, it would be remiss of me not to ask you how you were, now Ethan is not here and big cases, big cases that make the Today, well, they can really bring it up for a girl.’ Because Ethan was not the crime reporter of the Today any more was the unsaid comment.
I downed about half of the gin and tonic. They’d skimped on the ice. I needed more. ‘It was over between me and Ethan before he left for London, as well you know. But, what about Talbot’s comments that he knew he wouldn’t be found guilty? The office was in uproar, well Ross was. He has conspiracy theory written through him like a stick of rock.’
Evie sipped ladylike on the mojito, peering at me over the top of the green foliage. ‘You have unresolved issues with Ethan.’
‘And his brother…’
‘Ethan’s brother? I didn’t know he had a brother.’
‘Not Ethan’s brother. I’m talking about the article, Evie. Get with it.’
‘And I’m attempting to talk about Ethan and his rapid departure. How you feel. You know, those things you hide from, Hannah.’
I snorted at her. Like she was one to talk. She pulled a face. She knew exactly what I was not saying. She played her social life the way she played it but what she liked to do was mother me and analyse mine. ‘Talbot, the not guilty verdict. What did you think of what he said?’ I tried again.
‘I can see why Ross would get his conspiracy knickers in a twist, but I don’t think Talbot being confident in release is grounds to suspect he nobbled the jury. Arrogant is another word for it.’
‘I shut Ross down when he piped up, but it does happen, few and far between…’
‘He’s crowing. What do you think Ethan would have said about it had he reported on it?’
‘I can’t put words in his mouth.’ I emptied my glass. I needed another. Evie raised an eyebrow.
‘I don’t think he’d have given this dick the space.’
‘I don’t think he’d have had a choice. It’s a story.’ I stood. ‘Another?’ She looked at her half-full glass. ‘Not yet.’ I strode across to the bar, ordered another and walked back to her. She was back on her phone, tapping into it, a smile across her face, mischievous. I looked across the bar, not surprised to see the scruffy haired male also smiling into his phone.
‘So.’ She looked up. ‘Have you heard from him since he went to work in the big smoke?’
I sighed. She wasn’t going to leave this. ‘He texted me and let me know he arrived okay, then, that he’d started the new job okay and that the people were okay. He’s not been in touch since.’
‘Did you reply to him?’
‘I told you, he hadn’t been in touch since.’
‘No, you idiot.’ Another look. ‘Which I know you’re not. Did you reply to his initial messages?’
‘There wasn’t much to say. Why do you think Talbot walked? Do you talk to anyone who knows any more than us?’
She shook her head. At this point, I didn’t know what she was shaking her head at. ‘Maybe the case was weak, Hannah. Not every job can or does end in a guilty verdict.’
‘But, the murder of a cop usually does. They’re usually wrapped up pretty tight. And his arrogance as you put it, it’s disconcerting.’
‘Granted, I’ll give you that. But so is your refusal to own up to missing Ethan.’
Pasha
The car idled and Pasha turned the radio up, listened to the news reporter talk about the recent trial and how he would get the “man on the street’s” view on what had happened. And he accosted people on the very street they walked down. She turned it back down. Looked out the window into the dark. She could see people exiting the building. Coming out alone, hands shoved in pockets, or leaving in pairs, engrossed in conversations. No sign of Darshit yet.
The radio burbled on, everyone had a viewpoint about the trial, but it was unlikely anyone knew what had really happened. Anyone but those at the heart of it and they weren’t likely to talk. She was interested, of course she was, but she knew they wouldn’t find out the truth behind it all.
The passenger door opened and the cool darkness slipped in as her brother folded himself into the empty seat. His long frame made it look like a Krypton Factor type of feat. Pasha had no idea where he got his height from. Probably a throwback from a bygone relative because their parents weren’t much taller than she was.
‘How did it go?’ she asked.
‘It went.’
It was the same response every time she asked the question. She knew she shouldn’t ask, but she hoped that one day he would feel that he could confide in her. She turned up without fail, work allowing, and even if she was at work she’d sneak off for the fifteen minutes it took to pick him up and deliver him home, if at all possible. Though in this new job, she didn’t fancy getting caught taking liberties.
Pasha pushed the gearstick into first and moved off. ‘You talk today?’
‘You know I won’t tell you, so why do we always have to do this?’ he grumbled at her as he stared straight ahead.
‘I don’t understand why you can’t talk to me, is all.’
‘I can talk to you, I do talk to you. But you aren’t responsible for me.’ He turned to her. His eyes pierced the gloom. She could feel him as he attempted to penetrate her skull with his mind. She blocked him out. Focused on the road. Funny how he had managed to turn the situation around so flawlessly. ‘I have to take responsibility for my own actions, Pash, and that’s a continual work in progress.’
It was too late. He’d shot from the hip when he talked about responsibility, and the arrow had done the damage. She couldn’t speak; it felt as though she had a mouth filled with cotton wool. She nodded, unseen in the dark of the car.
There was silence for a few minutes as she navigated the traffic. It was light at this time of night.
‘Hey, how’s work?’ He went for a change in subject.
He was trying. Pasha licked her lips to clear her mouth before she attempted to speak again. ‘Yeah, it’s good. I think I’ll like this unit. I think it will be the place I could settle.’
‘You deserve it after the shit you got in your last role. Have you had any comeback for grassing him up?’
Pasha took her eyes off the road for a moment, looked at her brother then back at the road. She was at a safe enough distance from the car in front to have given him a dead-eyed stare like she used to when they were smaller. ‘It’s not called grassing up, Darshit. I’m in the police not at school.’
She could feel him fidget at the side of her. Could feel his frustration as the energy built up inside of him, energy that he wouldn’t know how to get rid of. She felt the frustration too, how every time they got together they rubbed the other one up the wrong way. Said the wrong thing, asked the wrong question or answered in the wrong tone. She knew how it itched at his skin and made him crave a drink even more. Picking him up from AA meetings was her way of making sure he went straight home afterwards, was her way of supporting him, but it only served to irritate him. But she was his big sister and she had to take care of him.
‘Okay, we’ll talk about it if you want to,’ she said to him.
‘It was just a question.’
He was sulking now.
‘I should have answered properly in the first place, not had a dig about the way you asked. I’m sorry.’ She felt rather than saw him nod his head. ‘There was a little trouble when I started the grievance procedure against Scott for the racial term he used to my face, but that was because his mates thought he was trying to be funny and he wasn’t being abusive, but in the main everyone stood by me. To be honest, though, it’s such a hot potato, no one would really dare give me any more grief after I made the complaint. That’s why I felt it was time to move on. I didn’t know what was genuine and what was fear, and when this job came up on the intranet it was perfect timing. A fresh start.’
Darshit’s jitteriness had quietened. ‘I’m glad you stood up to them.’
Him
He’d killed before. It wasn’t new to him. But this, this, shit, this… he took a deep breath in an attempt to steady his nerves. He pulled the air into his lungs. The cool morning air; held it, tried to steady his fraying mind, then let it out slow and threw himself over double, grabbed his knees with his hands to steady himself. What he was about to do, this was different. He wasn’t even sure he could go through with it.
He tried the deep breath again but felt like an idiot. He was about to kill and here he was behaving like a pussy.
But, this was huge. He paced on the corner of the street a little more. It was dark. The street slept. He could see a bedroom light on further down the street, maybe someone getting organised for work. He needed this to be over. Looked at his watch. Did he really have to do this? He could walk away now and no one would be any the wiser. He could walk away now and it would all be over.
That was the issue. If he walked away, it would all be over. He had no choice. He’d made it this far, he had to go the extra step and finish the job. No one knew the decisions he had made up to this point would lead here, so there would be no blowback. It would never come back to him. But, shit.
He saw the car as it headed towards him and time for thinking was over.
The car pulled up to the kerb without indicating. A knot twisted under his ribcage. It went tight. He couldn’t breathe. He slammed his fist hard into his chest, forced air through. Sucked air in.
The time was now.
He walked to the car. The driver was still inside.
With a swift rap on the passenger window he bent down and smiled. The window whirred down. The glow from the nearby street light bathed them in enough soft light to see each other.
‘Have you seen the time?’ asked the driver.
Bile hit the back of his throat. Acidic and sour. He looked behind him. The street was still dead.
‘Yeah.’ He paused. His hands were slick with sweat. He pushed his left hand down his jeans leg. Dried it off.
‘You okay?’ The driver again.
‘Yeah, it’s just…’ His fingers tightened around the grip of the gun which was down in his right hand.
He didn’t have a choice. This had to be done. It had been decided a long time ago. He raised his arm, pointed and pulled the trigger.
The driver didn’t see it coming, he had looked away. Back to his phone.
His breath caught in his throat. The world tipped and a stiff chill entered his bones.
It was too late to change his mind. Too late to turn back.
The plan was in motion.
Hannah
The sun had started to warm the day. Lifting it gradually out of the cool of the night. It was early September and though the days had shortened, we still had a pleasant temperature as we headed into autumn. The weather had altered the minute schools had gone back, after the summer holidays. It always puzzled my brain how we could stand outside at crime scenes and view the most horrific images that humans did to one another, when the sky overhead lit us up with powder blue skies and a scattering of cotton clouds. The contrast was bizarre. The dark and the light.
Striped socks stood out above sedate and conservative black shoes poking through the passenger side door of the Range Rover Evoque. I tried not to stare at the bottom that hovered above the colourful socks and trained my eyes above and over.
‘Time of death,’ came the voice from deep within the vehicle, ‘was approximately one to four hours ago.’
I checked my watch. We’d been here half an hour.
The rough time of death meant it would have been very early this morning, but there still could have been someone about. The person who called it in may have even seen more than they thought. Or at least one of the neighbours might have been up. We would need to move on the house-to-house inquiries.
I looked down the street; blue and white police tape flapped across from one pavement to the other. I looked in the other direction and was met by the same picture. Uniform had secured the scene well. A crowd had gathered but the tape was far enough back that they couldn’t get a decent view.
The socks and bum started to shuffle backwards out of the car until standing before me was Jack Kidner, friend and registered Home Office Pathologist.
The Range Rover he’d extricated himself from was parked in front of the victim’s house. The driver hadn’t got far or alternatively, he had nearly made it to the safety of his home. Instead he was slumped in the driver’s seat, his seat belt unfastened, head tilted towards the driver’s window. There was a mobile phone in his lap.
This was a straightforward residential street, Wilford Grove in the Meadows, a mix of terraced and semi-detached houses. Cars dotted along both sides.
‘I’m worried, Jack.’
His face contorted into a look of concern. ‘About what, young Hannah?’
‘This will be a feeding frenzy, a circus.’
‘You’re right of course.’
‘Before we extricate him, I think we should tent the vehicle. It’s okay at the minute, he’s not in view, but once we start to move him, well…’
‘Good plan. Especially as I will have to bag his head. I don’t want to lose any particulates when we move him. And that never looks nice to the lay-person.’
It didn’t look particularly pleasant to me, but I understood what he meant. I flicked my gaze to Doug Howell, the crime scene manager, who was crouched, talking to one of the CSIs who was down next to the vehicle collecting debris from around it. Doug was a CSI until his recent promotion.
Doug saw my look and stood. I requested the tent and explained my reason. He was more than happy to organise it and strode off towards the outer rim of the scene to prepare.
‘You’re confident that this is the murder scene then, Jack?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes. Absolutely.’ He flicked his gloves off and bagged them in a brown paper bag. ‘You’ll need to ask Doug the same question, but for my money, he was killed where he sat.’ He pulled a pen out of his bag and signed an exhibit label for the gloves.
Doug walked back towards us.
‘You examined the scene before Jack turned up, Doug. You happy this is the murder site?’ I asked again. I needed to know if the team had to search for any other crime scenes.
‘Examining the blood spatter and the way he’s leant against the window, I’m more than happy to state that this is your kill spot.’
I thanked Doug and leaned down and looked in through the open door of the car at the body in the car seat. The body of the Meadows gang leader, Simon Talbot. The man who had only yesterday walked out of Nottingham Crown Court a free man. Free of a murder charge against a police officer. The left side of his face was bloody where the bullet had entered and blood had sprayed out. Some would say this was karma. I would call it murder.
I turned to Jack. ‘Someone wasn’t happy with the not guilty plea then.’
‘It would look that way. A quick way to go. He wouldn’t have any time to think or react. A bullet in the brain is swift. I’d suggest they didn’t want to torture him, they wanted him dead.’
‘And he opened the window for whoever it was as well, I see. No shattered glass.’
‘A very tidy job indeed.’
‘Yes, we’ll see if any of the prints lifted from the passenger door come back to anyone other than Talbot.’ I wondered who would want him dead. Who had this man pissed off enough to kill him not twenty-four hours after he walked out of court. Yes, he was in a business where violence was always a possibility, but this was something else. This was direct and purposeful. A need to kill and for death to be the outcome, not pain or violence for violence sake. Someone wanted Simon Talbot dead.
I didn’t like what popped into my head. The people with the biggest grudges right now were PC Ken Blake’s family, and cops. Blake’s friends. People who believed in justice and had seen a killer, or who they believed to be a killer, walk free.
It couldn’t be right, but who else?
I needed t
o find some answers.
‘There’s a folded-up piece of paper on the passenger side seat,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t know if you want to seize it now or leave it for the CSIs?’
‘I suited up to get this close, I may as well lean in and get it now, see if it’s relevant before I head back and open up the incident room.’
I looked to Doug. ‘I know this isn’t, or shouldn’t be done this way, but I need to see what’s on that paper. Have you taken the photographs of him already? Did you photograph it in situ?’
‘You know how I feel about this,’ he sighed. ‘But, yes, I photographed it. If you insist on retrieving it, I want it photographed every step of the way.’
‘Okay,’ I agreed. And Doug waved a CSI over who was photographing his colleague as he worked around the vehicle.
I turned to Martin who was taking photographs of the standing crowd. ‘Have you got an evidence bag on you, Martin?’
He walked over and handed one to me. ‘Creepy fuckers give me weird looks for photographing them when they’re stood there trying to get a look at a dead guy.’
‘Anyone of interest?’
‘I think there are a couple from the Meadows gang here. To make sure we do our jobs properly I presume. Other than that, no one would dare to look too gleeful, not around here anyway.’
‘Okay, thanks.’ I took the bag from him.
‘I’ve got a full day lined up today, Hannah, one is a cot death which I can’t move, so the earliest I can get your man in is tomorrow,’ said Jack.
‘That’s fine, thanks, Jack.’
I leaned into the vehicle, careful not to touch the interior of the car. There was blood, bits of bone and grey matter that had been flung out as the bullet barrelled its way into Talbot’s skull. All I needed was to pick up the paper.
In the confined space of the car, the stench of Talbot’s blood invaded my brain. It had a thickness to it, metallic and with a strangely sweet feel. My skin itched inside the Tyvek suit and I wanted to get out of the vehicle – even though I was barely inside it – as quick as I could. I needed to get on with this. The copper smell of a bloody death pushed at my nose, needled my brain. I picked up the paper and stepped back to the cold, fresh air and gulped it down.
The DI Hannah Robbins Series: Books 1 - 3 (Boxset) (Detective Hannah Robbins Crime Series) Page 47
