by LJ Ross
“If you’d asked me that thirty years ago, I’d have said there was a whole village full of people who wanted to hurt him,” she said. “But now? I can’t think of anybody. Why would they choose to hurt him now? He barely left the house, or spoke to anybody but me.”
“Thank you, Mrs Watson, Mrs Emerson. We’ll see ourselves out.”
* * *
Ryan and Phillips spent another few minutes questioning Michael Emerson, and then bade him a polite farewell. Time was marching on, and Ryan still had a ‘To Do’ list as long as the Lambton Worm. All the same, he took a moment to stop and lean his forearms on the wooden fence overlooking the equestrian centre to watch the horses graze in the thick summer grass. Hazy afternoon sunshine bounced off the monument in the background.
“What’d you make of them?” Phillips asked, coming to rest beside him.
Ryan waited until a woman with a pram had walked past them, before answering.
“Undercurrents,” he said, shortly. “Secrets and lies. The usual.”
Phillips chuckled.
“For instance, it strikes me that Mike Emerson was cagey when we asked him his whereabouts in the early hours of Friday morning. According to him, he was working late.”
Phillips guffawed.
“As the Head of Planning in a local council? Even the most dedicated wouldn’t work past four or five in the afternoon,” he said.
“I think we’re more likely to find that Mr Emerson was ‘working late’ at his secretary’s house, or something of that ilk,” Ryan drawled. “He’ll come out with it, when he realises that we don’t tolerate lies.”
“Aye, doesn’t strike me as the brightest of sparks,” Phillips said. “It’s his wife who wears the trousers in that relationship.”
“You sound like an Agony Aunt column,” Ryan teased.
“Aye, and without my sound wisdom and guidance, you’d have found yourself in many a scrape, by now.”
Ryan thought of the times he’d been stabbed—twice—thrown into a river, hunted, falsely accused and almost murdered on several occasions, but supposed it could have been worse.
“It’s true, you’ve been a guiding light, these past years.”
Phillips grinned.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “As for the Emersons, I’d say it’s a classic case of two people who got married young and don’t have much in common, anymore.”
“Not forgetting, she’s the local celebrity,” Ryan put in. “Some men can’t handle it, when their partner’s more successful.”
“Poor bastards,” Phillips said, and scratched the side of his nose. “Truth be told, I bloody love the fact Denise is the one in the driving seat, as it were…”
Words he could never un-hear, Ryan thought.
“Ah, Frank—”
“Nothing like a woman in uniform,” he continued, with a wicked chuckle.
When Phillips began to gaze off into the middle distance, Ryan judged it was time to make a speedy departure.
“Time to go,” he declared, and set off at a brisk pace back to the car. “The widow couldn’t tell us much more about the way she found Alan, except that he was lying on the sofa, face-up as you would expect.”
“Aye, but it sounds as though everybody in the village knew what Alan Watson was like. Doesn’t take much for people to learn that he’s in the habit of staying up late at night, drinking himself daft. Sally Emerson confirmed what we already assumed—that her parents usually left the doors unlocked—so anybody could have snuck in and shoved a cushion over the old boy’s face, while he snored.”
Ryan could see it, all too easily.
Phillips waited a beat, then checked his watch. “What about that other business?”
“It’s in hand,” was all Ryan would say.
CHAPTER 10
Lowerson was at his desk when the first photo message arrived.
He felt the burner mobile vibrate in his jacket pocket, and a sick feeling spread in his belly. As if she could sense his disquiet, Melanie Yates looked up from her computer screen and fixed him with a watchful stare.
“I’m going to make a cuppa,” he said. “Anybody else want one?”
He rose unsteadily and waggled the cup in his hand.
MacKenzie smiled and shook her head, and Yates simply looked back at her computer.
“Back in a mo’,” he said, in a voice he hardly recognised as his own.
Mo? Any more ridiculous phrases like that, and the whole office would know something was wrong.
Instead of heading directly to the break room, Lowerson ducked into the gents toilets and, after a brief check beneath the stalls, shut himself inside the end cubicle. He put the seat down and sat on top of it, swiped a hand across his face and then reached for the mobile.
There were three messages.
The first was an extremely compromising image of himself, naked, on a bed with a woman lying on top of him in the throes of passion. His face was turned away from the camera, but his hands appeared to be wrapped around her waist, while her breasts brushed against his cheek.
The woman in the picture was Rochelle White.
The second picture message was similar, this time of the two of them sleeping side by side; she, naked at the front of the image while he lay behind with his arm draped around her naked waist.
The third message read:
YOU MADE AN AGREEMENT. ANY FURTHER FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN THESE IMAGES BEING SENT DIRECTLY TO THE POLICE STANDARDS DEPARTMENT. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.
Lowerson knew who had sent them, and why.
He slid off the toilet seat onto the floor, only just managing to shove it up again before he was violently ill.
* * *
As MacKenzie shrugged on her jacket and prepared to leave the office to collect Samantha from school, she decided to take the opportunity to ask Yates the question that had been on the tip of her tongue all day. With Lowerson still out of the room, it seemed the ideal moment.
“Mel, are you alright?”
If it had been anybody else, Yates might have come up with a hundred different excuses, but she would not lie to MacKenzie.
“I’ve been better,” she admitted, casting a quick glance over her shoulder towards the door.
“Has something happened between you and Jack?”
MacKenzie hoped not; it had taken long enough for the pair of them to finally admit their feelings for one another.
“I guess you could say, nothing’s happened, and nothing will,” Yates replied, swallowing the tears that lodged unexpectedly in her throat. “I thought we might have had something and, last week…well, it doesn’t matter now. He told me this morning he’d rather stay as friends and work colleagues, so that’s that.”
She pretended to look at the words on her computer screen, but they swam before her eyes.
MacKenzie felt a wash of maternal feeling for the younger woman, and hardly knew what to say.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and walked around to lay a supportive hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Listen, it’s almost three o’clock and I need to head off, but why don’t you come over for dinner tonight?”
“Oh, no—I wouldn’t like to impose.”
“It’s no imposition, Mel. We’d love to have you.”
Yates almost refused, but then she thought of the solo journey home to her parents’ house, which she was desperate to leave. The atmosphere was like a mortuary, and she couldn’t face the prospect of another long, lonely night binge-watching the latest Netflix drama or picking up her sister’s old case file.
“Alright,” she said. “That would be lovely, thanks Denise.”
MacKenzie turned to leave, then surprised herself again by reaching down to peck her friend’s cheek.
“Chin up,” she murmured.
* * *
Before they considered their duty discharged, Ryan and Phillips decided to take a detour on their way back to Police Headquarters, via the city of Sunderland. It lay betwee
n the cities of Durham and Newcastle, at the mouth of the River Wear. Like Newcastle, it had a long history of coal mining and shipbuilding but, following the decline of those industries, it had turned its hand to car manufacture and other high-tech ventures instead. Ryan had often thought that Northerners came from hardy and adaptable stock, able to turn their hands to almost any trade—and weather any storm, real or otherwise—and this was never truer than in Sunderland.
Despite the wealth of skills and a capable labour force, there was not a ready supply of jobs to meet the demand, and when Ryan pulled up beside the jobcentre in the centre of the town, they found a queue stretching along the pavement outside.
“Let’s see if Simon Watson can spare us a moment of his time,” he said, heading to the main entrance. “Did you run a quick check?”
“Is the Pope Catholic?” Phillips replied. “Course I did. He’s got an interesting history, this one. Quite a few juvenile pops for shoplifting—nothing too serious, just a bag of sweets or a can of cider from the corner shop, that kind of thing. He narrowly escaped time in borstal for joyriding, back when he was fourteen. There was nothing else until his early twenties, when he was given a twelve-month ban for driving under the influence of drugs.”
“What kind?” Ryan wondered.
“Class A—heroin,” Phillips replied, and gave a long whistle. “Seems to have got himself back on the straight and narrow, if he’s one of the managers here.”
“Unless he didn’t declare it on his application form,” Ryan said. “How many workplaces always check the finer details?”
“Aye, that’s true. I said I was six feet two and a professional stunt man for Robert Redford, before I joined the Force.”
“Close enough,” Ryan grinned.
* * *
They found Simon Watson engaged in an animated discussion on the telephone.
“What the hell do you mean, they won’t endorse it? Get on to them again and tell them this is a point of principle!”
A pause.
“You’re not listening,” he said, to whoever was at the other end of the phone line. “Universal Credit is a bloody menace. I’ve got hardworking people coming in here every day—single parents who want to work rather than take from the state. I’ve got those parents tellin’ me that they can’t afford to eat during the long school holidays because they’re on zero-hour contracts…yes, you know what that means. It means, they don’t get paid bugger-all for the whole summer holidays because they can’t get cover…aye, I know they can apply for Universal Credit but, the point is, that takes eight weeks to come through. The holidays are over by then!”
Watson spotted Ryan and Phillips, and held up one finger.
“Yep. Yep, well, listen, mate. I hope you never find yourself in the same position and, if you do, let’s hope somebody gives a monkey’s, eh?”
With that, he slammed the phone receiver back into its cradle.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered. “Can I help you? I’m not sure if you’re aware, but there’s a ticketing system in place…”
“We’re from Northumbria CID,” Ryan interjected, reaching for his warrant card. “DCI Ryan and DS Phillips. We’re looking into the circumstances around your father’s unfortunate death, last week. Our sincere condolences.”
Simon nodded mutely, and indicated the chairs arranged in front of his desk.
“We only need a few minutes of your time,” Ryan assured him. “Perhaps there’s somewhere more private?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Simon said. “You can barely hear yourself think in here, as it is.”
Phillips could understand what he meant. The centre consisted mainly of one large, open-plan room the size of a community hall. There was a welcome counter at the front, and service desks were arranged at intervals, each with two visitors’ chairs apiece. The entire place thrummed with noise, so it was difficult to make themselves heard without raising their voices above the usual level. It was also unlikely that anybody would be able to listen in to their conversation or pick out its content from the general chatter.
“We were hoping to ask you a couple of questions, if you have the time?”
“Now’s as good a time as any,” Simon replied. “Fire away.”
Ryan smiled, wondering how best to approach the subject matter. From what he had seen, Joan Watson’s children were very different in temperament and style. Sally was polished, whereas Simon was brash; Sally was well-dressed and groomed, whereas Simon was scruffy; and their overall manner was at odds with one another. Sally seemed to take a logical approach to her work whereas, from what they’d just heard, Simon preferred to shoot from the hip.
“To begin with, would you mind telling us a bit about your father? We’re trying to build up a picture of his life.”
Simon blew out a gusty breath and steepled his fingers against his chin.
“When we were kids, growing up, he was brilliant,” he said. “He must’ve been knackered after a day down the pit, but he always found time for us. He was never too busy to have a game of Monopoly, or a kick around with the football.”
He cleared his throat, battling the wave of emotion that came with the old memories.
“He used to dance our mum around the kitchen,” he recalled. “He’d turn the radio on, and waltz her across the lino squares.”
Phillips smiled, thinking of his own parents, when they’d been alive.
“Sounds like a happy home,” he said.
“Aye, it was. After the strike though…” Simon shook his head, and ran agitated fingers through his hair. “I was a part of it, too. Started working at Penshaw Colliery the year before the strike started. I was seventeen and Sally was twenty.”
“You must remember quite a bit of it,” Ryan said.
“I remember all of it,” Simon said, in a low voice. “People were worried sick, wondering what would happen to life as they knew it. To us, it seemed like the government couldn’t give a toss about what happened to us, after their bloody programme of closures.”
“Anger still runs high, when you think of it?”
Simon gave a short nod.
“You asked about my Da’? I’ll tell you what happened to him. He was a good man who worked hard, and the strike wrung him out. It changed him. But, even after it was all done with, he might have been able to pick himself up—he was talking about re-training as an engineer, going to night school. But then, the rumours started.”
Ryan decided to play dumb.
“The rumours?”
Simon nodded again.
“You have to understand—people were hurt and angry. Half of them were in denial, even after the colliery gates closed for the last time. We kept thinking something would happen to reverse the decision. After all, the mine had been in profit before it closed…people couldn’t understand. So, they started looking for reasons and ways to place blame.”
“And they blamed your father?”
Simon nodded.
“Partly. He was big in the Union, back then. He went to all the high-level meetings, even met Scargill himself. When people heard the rumours about Silver Fox—that bloke who was feeding information to Thatcher’s Head of PR—they started thinking about all the other moles who might’ve been helping her to break the strike.”
“You don’t really think all that was going on, do you?” Phillips put in.
“Doesn’t matter what I think,” Simon muttered. “The reasoning was, if somebody was helping the government, they’d need to be fairly senior in the Union to know what its plans were. People put two and two together and came up with ten.”
Phillips made a quick, scribbled note in his pad about industrial spies, and put a question mark beside it.
“They called him The Worm,” Simon said, and couldn’t quite disguise the tremble in his voice. “They made it so he was ashamed to leave the house.”
“That must have been very difficult,” Ryan said.
“Difficult?” Simon laughed. “Try going to t
he pub and coming home with fresh bruises every night. Try getting served at the shop, or asking a girl out to the pictures. It wasn’t just dad who got it in the neck; nobody wanted to have anything to do with us.”
“Seems like your sister’s done well, being head of the Council and all that?” Phillips offered.
“She could sell ice to an Inuit, that one,” Simon said, without malice. “Always had the gift of the gab. To give her her dues, she did a lot to smooth things over for our mum. She couldn’t work miracles, but people remembered that Sally had done her bit during the strike, too. She got her hands dirty, worked hard and mucked in.”
She wasn’t shy to talk about it, either, if her last election campaign was anything to go by, Phillips thought to himself.
“And, what about you, Simon?” Ryan asked, and then gestured around the office. “Seems like you’ve got yourself a solid place, here?”
“I have now,” Simon admitted. “I won’t lie, and you probably know it all, anyway. After the mine closure and all that stuff, I went through a bad patch. Ended up falling in with the wrong people and getting myself hooked on heroin.”
They didn’t pretend to be surprised.
“And now?”
“I’ve been clean for three years, now,” Simon said, with a touch of pride. “It was the hardest thing I ever did, but I finished the programme. That’s why they let me have a job, here. I worked my way up the ladder and now I’m a manager, and I’ve got some self-respect back. At least dad lived to see that.”
“That must have made him proud,” Phillips said.
Simon nodded, and looked away to hide the sheen of tears.
“Do you think somebody would have wanted to hurt your dad, after all these years?” Ryan asked. “Was he in any trouble?”
Simon shook his head slowly.
“It was years ago, and he kept himself to himself. If anybody wanted to hurt him, they’d have done it by now. Besides, he was eighty. What trouble could he get into?”
That was the question, Ryan thought.
“Look, you don’t really…you don’t really think somebody would’ve set the fire deliberately—do you?”
Simon looked between them with troubled eyes.
